Renovis Labs: Renewed Energy to Pharma through Chemical and Engineering innovation
Unedited, Raw, Flow
Many friends and former colleagues have recently asked me to share details on my latest venture, Renovis Labs, as I have stayed hush during the pandemic on this one. After having built companies in spaces such as AI in Drug design to Animal Health and non-invasive diagnostics (2 exits, 2 active), I have donned the founders and chief executive’s hat one more time and have come forward along with some epic partners to build what we call the future of Pharma as a Joint Venture between 2 world class organizations to serve humanity. And it is about time…
Renovis is on a mission to transform the pharmaceutical industry in the coming decade by automating back-end R&D using microfluidics and streamline manufacturing using continuous flow science. Big words carry big weight. Yes. But simply speaking, in our hearts, we are driven to make high quality medicines that are standardized, affordable, traceable and available to all and not just the wealthy and rich.
The pandemic highlighted how insecure and unprepared global Pharma industry and national Governments are in terms of stocking and supply chain of essential medicines. Essential medicines are drugs that are critical in saving people’s lives. The list (originally put together by WHO, and now each G7 country has its own) consists of drugs like, anti-infectives, anti-virals, anti-cancer and many more life saving medications. Imagine another pandemic where countries are forced to shut their border for years with no import/export. How many countries can literally survive a situation like this? Right now, not even United States of America can!!! US is heavily dependent on China and India for 80% of all the medicines its citizens take every day. Similarly India depends 70% on Chinese imports for all its medicines currently. Aah you may say yet another anti-China guy… hmm not really, this is the grim reality that needs to be tackled head on to prevent major drug shortages in future. And that is exactly Renovis’ game plan.
Microfluidics
Microfluidics allow us to miniaturize chemistry on a chip, almost like what silicon chips did for computing. Imagine running thousands of chemical reactions and monitoring them in real-time. A pipe dream for many in the industry. This will save enormous amounts of time and money for all chemical/industrial researchers trying to either synthesize new molecules or optimize existing ones. To illustrate this with numbers and a real case scenario, currently it takes a team of 2–3 chemists 3–6 months to finalize a chemical reaction that can go into commercial drug manufacturing. But using sophisticated microfluidics on a chip, one can get results within days if not a couple of weeks. (bits and pieces of this tech and general feasibility has been proven, but a single collective chip is still a pipe dream)
Continuous Flow
Think manufacturing, imagine large plants with massive machines and hundred people running around with large containers feeding these plants with raw material to churn out product. This industrial revolution (Circa 18th-19th century) era practice has not really changed for Pharma, where many other industries such as mobility, space and Agri have moved to automation.
Enter: Continuous Flow. In 2012 researchers at MIT (https://web.mit.edu/braatzgroup/end_to_end_continuous_manufacturing_of_pharmaceuticals_integrated_synthesis_purification_and_final_dosage_formation.pdf) took raw powder chemicals and using a Sci-Fi like machine not bigger than a washing machine could print out tablets of the final drug at the other end. This black box approach had plenty of engineering and design within that allowed mixing of raw chemicals, resulting in reactions, purifications, drying, vaccuming, formulating and manufacturing all in one box. Manufacturing reduced to size of your bedroom! Swallow that :) Yes, its happening already.
Renovis is looking to introduce continuous flow manufacturing for a number of its products in the next 5 years. We plan to do so by licensing/purchasing and acquiring existing flow units and in parallel forming a global group of experts in continuous flow (we are currently advised by the Indian Central Gov -National Chemical Laboratory, Pune) who will help us file design patents for continuous flow units designed specifically for our essential medicines portfolio. A core hardware tech that can be tweaked for a product is what we are aiming for. Currently, Flow equipment is product specific, the only drawback of this tech.
A S&T Hero’s Journey
All STEM (Science and tech) entrepreneurs who embark on grand tech journeys struggle with a problem. Capital and Tech Evolution. Many run around VC houses for years with little or no progress on the core tech as to launch such products and technologies you do need large amounts of capital. One advise I have always given to many STEM entrepreneurs is to think like a baniya (Indian Jew) and do whatever it takes to generate cash to run the company- even if it means straying away from your north star for a while. I say this as i was inspired by my former CEO (Astex Pharma, NYSE:ASTX-Billion Dollar Baby) told me how he spent the first 2 years doing something completely different-keeping his North Star in mind, but it gave him cash to hire a Rockstar team and invest in his tech to make it investment ready- he never looked back. Many sceptics would say, why change the course, I say Columbus did and look at what that mother fucker found ;) Don't be conventional please! Of course I have applied this to my previous S&T ventures.
Although Renovis is flushed with money, and I am a hard core typical corporate-numbers sucker now-who believes in beautiful books but I continue to strive to generate cash flow for the company through conventional or dhandha style global pharma deals using batch manufacturing up until our dream technology platforms come out for the world!
