Collaboration will strengthen Houston’s life science market, panelists say

It was standing room only at the Rice University BioScience Research Collaborative auditorium when about 600 people attended the Texas Life Science Forum May 26, 2016.

Hosted by BioHouston, Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship and the Texas Healthcare & Bioscience Institute, the forum brings together industry experts, education sessions, local resources for startups and a glimpse into Houston life science success stories, as well as gives new players a chance to pitch their innovative technologies.

New this year to the event was a mobile app that enabled participants to read about all of the speakers and companies, as well as keep up with the agenda and give feedback on the event.

While welcoming the group, Brad Burke, managing director of the Rice Alliance, noted that if this event had taken place 10 years ago, it would have been different. Today, there are five Nasdaq-listed life science companies in Texas—six if counting Reata Pharmaceuticals, which started trading on the Nasdaq as the event was getting underway.

“The life sciences landscape and the ecosystem has progressed,” Burke said.

However, the morning’s keynote speaker, Erik Halvorsen, Ph.D., director of the Texas Medical Center’s Innovation Institute, said it was going to take a coordinated effort to transform Houston’s life science landscape into one that is recognized outside of the city.

“There are two things in common with the companies I helped out with in Boston: One, the technology, intellectual property and discoveries originally came from academia, and two, not one person did all of that. It was a collaboration,” he said. “Here, we have great academic programs at the universities within the largest medical center, which is an unbelievable resource. And the strength of the medical center is the increasing collaboration between everyone.”

Following Halvorsen was Nate Chang, a biotechnology investment banker at Credit Suisse, who showed data on life science company investment activity that could prove the market bubble may have burst.

Activity peaked in May 2015, but Chang said it is a cyclical market that is going to take some time to recover. He also said it was a good time for corporate strategies, with mergers and acquisitions likely to increase as the sense of urgency among biotech companies continues to grow.

He did have one word of caution those companies: “Going ‘hostile’ is not a tactic that is going to win you assets,” Chang said, referring to recent company M&A news.

Looking back locally, the panel on startup resources in Texas talked about what things are needed for Houston to have more life science companies make it to commercialization:

“Access to investors and access to talent,” said Emmanuelle Schuler, Ph.D., director of Johnson and Johnson Innovation’s JLABS @ TMC.

John Reale, managing director of Station Houston, suggested investors needed to better understand the industry, in which companies have a longer lead time to get to commercialization—typically between five and 10 years.

Angela Shah, editor of Xconomy Texas, moderated the panel and said last year, most of the startup resources did not exist. Erin Flores, Ph.D., business analyst at the TMC Innovation Institute, agreed, saying this was the beginning of momentum, and what Houston needed was the right people at the right time coming together. Now that the right people are in place, she said, next year will show even more progress.

Later in the day, 52 companies, including four companies from the TMCx Accelerator, presented their technologies. Of the 52 startups, two-thirds had already raised significant funds, about $230 million, Burke said.

At the end of the event, Rice Alliance presented two awards: “The Most Promising Life Science Companies” and the “Michael E. DeBakey Life Sciences Award.”

The 10 promising companies were:

• Acera Surgical
• C4 Imaging
• Curtana Pharmaceuticals Inc.
• Entvantage Diagnostics Inc.
• Formation Biologics
• Mu Therapeutics
• Oncolix Inc.
• Pulmotect Inc.
• Stream Biomedical
• Teomics

The 2016 DeBakey Award went to Gravitas Medical Inc., an Austin-based company is developing a nasogastric feeding system to improve patient health outcomes.