With my background in pharmacy and R&D, I’ve been brought in to help out on a lot of biotech projects. Helping RiverRock Bioscience get up and off the ground was perhaps one of the most interesting.
When they first approached me, RiverRock had recently acquired licensing rights to a new antimicrobial technology invented by Paul B. Savage. Called “ceragenins”, these unique molecules imitated the shape and activity of the body’s antimicrobial peptides.
Ceragenins
Antimicrobial peptides are part of our immune system. In a nutshell, they are little protein chains that float around in our bodies and bore holes in the cell walls of bacteria and fungi.
Under normal circumstances, antimicrobial peptides are hard to manufacture and don’t last very long. That isn’t a problem in the body—which is constantly manufacturing them—but it’s made them hard to use for medical purposes.
Ceragenins, however, changed all of that. They’re relatively easy to produce and chemically stable, which means that they can last for weeks or even years. As a result, they have the potential to change how we approach sanitization.
The Problem
While this was all very exciting, RiverRock had a few challenges ahead of them. First, since most people don’t know much about antimicrobial peptides or how they work, it was hard to explain why ceragenins were so exciting. Second, ceragenins had so much untapped and untested potential that it was hard to identify which opportunities to focus on.
Finally, because of the previous two problems, they were having a hard time getting the investors they needed. Getting into biotech isn’t cheap or easy, so if you want to succeed, you need investors. My job was to help RiverRock solve all of these problems.
Figuring Things Out
To help RiverRock clearly communicate what the ceragenins were and how they worked, I created countless assets for the company: pitch decks, research articles, reviews, opinion pieces, and many other pitch and marketing materials. I compiled data from well over a thousand scientific papers and resources, made it easy to understand and compelling for potential investors and buyers.
To help them prioritize their product opportunities, I ran in-depth scientific studies with different ceragenins to validate their efficacy and see how well they worked in different scenarios. Between these studies and a ton of research into how antimicrobial peptides work, I discovered something interesting: the biggest opportunity for RiverRock lay not in the antimicrobial properties of the ceragenins, but in their wound-healing properties.
This was a major breakthrough for the company and changed the entire direction of the business. Eventually, between the marketing materials and this new discovery, RiverRock was able to win millions in investor dollars.
The best part of the story? My original assessment of the product was correct. While ceragenins were originally viewed as an antimicrobial agent, their true power lay in their ability to promote wound healing. In clinical studies, ceragenins have been shown to increase the rate of wound healing by 33x.
Helping a company get started with a product that has literally changed (and saved) lives was incredibly fulfilling. While it was ultimately up to RiverRock and their team of internal scientists to bring the product to market, I love being a part of the research and development process that helps these kinds of business get off the ground.