When Gary Niehaus started teaching at what became the Northeast Ohio Medical University in 1985, research and invention looked a little different than it does today.
Faculty weren’t supposed to be part of companies. Traditionally, academics were expected to create a “body of literature” that a business person outside of higher ed could take and try to turn into a business, he said.
But things have changed over time as Ohio’s leaders saw the need to embrace industries beyond the state’s industrial core.
“There are not a lot of business people that have the background to be able to do that. And I think a lot of incredibly important research has not been tapped into to be able to create approaches that improve health, the general well being of the public in general,” Niehaus said. “So, universities are incredibly important in that, but the incubators were a fantastic invention to move things out of the university into actual application.”
Today, many of Ohio’s universities host incubators designed to commercialize academic research or support entrepreneurs in particular spaces.
One of those is NEOMED’s REDIzone, which stands for the Research, Entrepreneurship, Discovery and Innovation Zone. The goal of the REDIzone is to support local life science and biomedical entrepreneurs with NEOMED’s resources, including experts at the university, as well as to connect them to the region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
“We help improve health worldwide and support these startups,” said Jordan Walker, entrepreneurial program specialist at the REDIzone. “And it’s nice that we can do that in our regional area, as well.”
In her role, Walker helps the incubator’s in-person and remote clients with their day-to-day work, from needs in their lab and office spaces to network connections. She also helps with programming for the Kinetic Health Care Innovation in Motion program, NEOMED’s joint venture with Bounce Innovation Hub in Akron, which supports the development of new technologies and therapies in medicine. Walker can also help clients find solutions to needs on the business side of a startup, like legal or human resource assistance.
The REDIzone offers office space and wet labs – areas designed for research of things like biological materials, chemicals and drugs, equipped with sinks and eye wash stations – clients can use to base their business, as well as shared lab space and conference space.
Niehaus, chief scientist at Crystal Diagnostics, learned about the REDIzone pretty organically: when the university decided to start it about a decade ago, leadership chose the hallway where his office had been since the early ’90s.
Crystal Diagnostics makes a fully automated, liquid crystal-based pathogen detection system for food, a product that grew out of a brainstorming session Niehaus held with some of his peers at NEOMED and Kent State University in the early 2000s.
Having access to the REDIzone and NEOMED at large has been beneficial to Crystal Diagnostics’ growth. For example, since Crystal Diagnostics tests biological pathogens, Niehaus said there needs to be some sort of oversight group to make sure that happens safely. The university has a biosafety committee that can ensure just that. And it has an incinerator to dispose of pathogens safely after testing is done.
The university is designed for research, Niehaus said, so the resources entrepreneurs need are essentially built in. It would have been far more difficult to source those resources from the ground up.
Karen McGuire is the CEO and founder of BioMendics, a pharmaceutical company focused on finding medications and solutions for rare skin diseases. As the startup was getting off the ground, McGuire needed wet lab space, and quickly learned about the REDIzone.
It’s “extremely expensive to build out” a lab, McGuire said, and, though she’s been lucky to raise all of the funds she’s needed from Ohio investors and capital, she would have had to double it in order to set up space on her own. And that’s not even accounting for the work it takes to get all the necessary permits and make sure a space aligns with OSHA guidelines and others.
“I really don’t think we would have gotten this far without spaces like this,” she said. “You really need that when you’re first starting out.”
BioMendics has so far primarily focused on solutions for a blistering skin disease known as epidermolysis bullosa simplex, a genetic disorder that can impact affected children from birth.
The company uses a liquid crystal technology it calls MTORX to remove the mutated and damaged proteins in the skin, reducing the blistering patients experience and strengthening their skin. BioMendics made the REDIzone home around 2016 and finished up the basic research on its lead molecule, McGuire said. Today, it has clinical sites across the U.S. as its technology works through testing phases, though its home base, where innovations continue on its drug platform, is still at NEOMED.
McGuire said it takes luck, but also a strong support system to take translational research across the “valley of death,” where many promising innovations fail on the way to commercialization. A successful startup is going to need the right scientists, the right business people and the right investors. She thinks this is a region that can provide all of that, and she wants to see more biotech companies like hers here.
“It’s possible to do biotech in Ohio. We can do it. We have the people. We have the talent. I mean, we have amazing universities. We’re pumping out extremely talented people, whether it’s from Kent or Case,” McGuire said. “I always get frustrated whenever I talk to somebody, they’re like, ‘I’d love to do this work, but I’ve got to go to Boston, I’ve got to go to San Francisco,’ right? Before I started BioMendics, personally, I was thinking about, yeah, this may be where I have to go to do the work I want to do. I feel really fortunate to be able to be here, and I think there’s much more support from the community than people realize.”