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We spoke to Jack O’Meara, Founder & CEO of OchreBio. One of Oxford’s standout health tech startups. OchreBio is taking on the challenge of liver disease, the only one of the top 10 global killers on the rise, with the use of technology and innovation. 

Dive deep into what it takes to be a founder in tech, how to lean on the community for growth and what OchreBio is doing to treat liver disease more effectively, and save more lives. Certainly a hard road but rewarding as well, according to Jack O’Meara.

Treating the only big ten killer disease still on the rise with tech 

OcherBio is taking on the challenge of creating effective and life-saving treatments for liver disease, the only disease on the ten biggest killers list that is still on the rise. 

For Jack O’Meara there are a few reasons liver disease is still so dangerous and overlooked. Starting with:

There is (still) a sort of a stigma associated with liver disease

So, how is OchreBio approaching this huge goal?

We’ll let the OchreBio CEO explain how they are meeting the challenge on three fronts. 

 

The first, since the biology (of liver disease), is still not very well understood. We use a lot of these new genomic technologies. New tools that really zoom in on the disease and try and understand at a cellular level what’s happening. 

Second is the models that we’ve been using today to test those medicines, just don’t work. Animal models just don’t really recapitulate human disease at all, frankly. We (OchreBio) deprioritize animal studies and prioritize human tissue-based testing. So we take discarded tissues that can’t be used for transplant or otherwise. And we test out medicines in actual human disease tissue. We think that gives us a better chance of success when we get into actual human testing.

The last thing and this is a slightly more nuanced point, but the problem with liver disease as well is that patients don’t often know they have the disease for a very long time. As a result, clinical trials are very hard to recruit for. So, we try to find sort of niche smaller diseases that are well categorized so that we can get to proof of principle quickly before they go to the much larger disease.

The demands of the Founder’s journey

So, what does it take to tackle an important issue, build a response and make a profit from it all? 

In O’Meara’s experience, it requires the ability to become what the company needs you to become. 

It’s a really hard job and it forces you to have to adapt to the role. I think being a CEO and a founder really necessitates a certain type of person.

So while it was necessary for me to be a real sales guy at the beginning and tell the story, the vision helped to raise money. As the company’s gotten bigger and more, more stable, we’re making big product decisions. Now it’s more about being a strategist and being an excellent communicator

Advice from Jack O’Meara

I think it’s all about relationships with the people you’re in the day-to-day with. Invest heavily in the relationships and be really candid and honest about what you’re feeling and thinking as you’re in the weeds in the trenches together, because you have got to you got to get on. 

And then also ask for advice from people that have done it before and peers.

Building in Oxford

Oxford has become one of the most interesting places for startups in the last few years. For OchreBio it offers a great avenue to access talent focused on life sciences, a growing community. However, there are a few challenges here as well. 

Oxford is a phenomenal place to start a company. There are amazingly intelligent people in this part of the world, way smarter than me, which is intimidating to go to work. But it’s great to be able to recruit such hardworking, motivated and intelligent people. That’s a really big value add for the space.

The only thing I would say is there’s not a lot of scale of capital in Oxford.

There’s a bit of startup capital, But there isn’t that depth of sort of scale of capital and a lot of that still is really in the US. 

That’s why we try to build a bridge, having a site in the US and having some of our leadership team on our board in the US. It all that sort of helps, I think, to achieve the ambitions we set out.

The future for OchreBio 

The road ahead for OchreBio is bright with immense possibilities to take its tech into other areas besides liver disease, collaborate with big pharma and more.

In the next 12 months: 

Priority number one is getting our drug candidate nominated to move into sort of clinical readiness mode

In the long-term 

What I would love to see happen, and this is a little bit speculative, is that we build a really big differentiated business and go the whole way and build up multiple products that go on to impact lives at a really large scale.

I’d love for OchreBio to be a European or a UK example of a company that really grows and builds up great people, that builds great products and that is a sort of a new age big pharma company.

We can’t wait to see OchreBio succeed in their life-saving ambitions, and take its innovation even further! 

You can read the full interview transcript below.

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So today I’m joined by Jack O’ Meara, co-founder and CEO of Oxford Biotech, OchreBio. 

So welcome, Jack! 

Thank you very much. Very few people get my surname right the first time. So bravo Tim 

That microphone feature on LinkedIn that kind of gives you the audio so. Very useful.

I’m glad. 

And just on that actually just on your LinkedIn, just doing that little bit of preliminary, I noticed that you started life in some various kind of let’s say, left field roles. I think busker and barman were two that kind of stuck in my mind. I don’t, quite how you made it, from being a not very good busker to where you are today.

Yeah. My singing career was never going to take off, so that was something worthwhile pivoting. And then livers, liver disease was also something I felt was a worthwhile goal.

Very much so. Very much so.

Given the barman part of my time perhaps now.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So I mean, welcome. I know that you guys, were just chatting off camera that you guys were funded, I think in the middle part of last year (2021). So really worthwhile cause of fighting liver disease, I guess both here in the UK and internationally. I guess these problems occur globally, not just limited to a UK issue.

Absolutely. It’s particularly in the industrialized world, it’s the third leading cause of premature death. It’s a very global problem. I think China, there’s a big issue with liver disease. The Asian population tends to suffer slightly more than the West, but it’s definitely a global issue. As we all live longer and eat crappier foods, our liver gets under more pressure and then liver disease becomes more and more prevalent.

And there haven’t really been any successful treatments to date for patients. So, we’re hoping the work that we’re doing here in Oxford and globally, we got teams in New York and Taiwan can actually really make a big impact on a global scale.

Yeah, absolutely. I noticed actually looking through some of the information online that liver disease is actually still the only disease in the top ten killers that is on the increase globally, which I thought was actually quite a startling statistic.

Yeah. I mean, I think fortunately for society at large, we’ve made a lot of headway with things like cancer treatments ten years ago where we had a different place and than where we are today. But any and even sort of metabolic treatments and so on and so forth. 

But liver (disease) hasn’t had that success. It really hasn’t. It’s been a little bit of a neglected space.

There is sort of a stigma associated with liver disease, maybe that influences investment in the field to some extent. But it’s a massive issue. You know, I mean, so many families and people are affected by it to some extent. And we’re yeah, we’re hoping to be able to make a real impact.

Talking at a high level, because I’m not a medical person. I’m interested in companies’ investment and founders’ journeys. At a high level, what is it that you guys are achieving or the research that you’re conducting that makes a difference in this really clearly, really important area?

Yeah, Look, I think one of the when we started the business four years ago now, we really sort of took a look at liver disease and tried to figure out why have we as a, you know, pharmaceutical sector not really been able to make much of an impact here at all. And we identified three big reasons that we thought were the challenges we wanted to try and address as we set up the company and set up our own sort of approach.

The first is the biology is still not very well understood. So, even in academic circles we still don’t really have a good idea of what is driving the disease. We know there are certain sociological factors that drive it, but at a scientific and cellular level, what’s going on? So we use a lot of these new genomic technologies. Things like, you may have heard of single-cell sequencing.

New tools that really zoom in on the disease and try and understand at a cellular level what’s happening and what could be ways to treat it. So that was the first thing we spent a lot of time and resources on, particularly in the early days of the company investing heavily. And the second thing was, okay, let’s say you find a new potential driver that needs to make a new medicine.

The models that we’ve been using today to test those medicines, just don’t work. Animal models just don’t really recapitulate human disease at all, frankly. You know, there’s been hundreds of drugs tested in clinical trials for liver disease. They’ve all failed, but they all worked in a mouse at some point. So, you know, there’s something wrong with the mouse.

It’s not telling us what we need to know if it’s giving us complete false positives. So we tried to deprioritize animal studies and prioritize human tissue-based testing. So we take discarded tissues that can’t be used for transplant or otherwise. And we test out medicines in actual human disease tissue. We think that gives us a better chance of success when we get into actual human testing.

We’re making drugs for humans, not mice. We should be focusing on human disease. And the last thing and this is a slightly more nuanced point, but the problem with liver disease as well is that patients don’t often know they have the disease for a very long time. As a result, clinical trials are very hard to recruit for they have to be very large, very well powered and that makes them quite expensive to run.

So, we try to find sort of niche smaller diseases that are well categorized so that we can get to proof of principle quickly before they go to the much larger disease. So we think liver transplantation is a great place where we can have a big impact, improve outcomes for liver transplant patients and in doing so, prove our medicines work, and then use that to sort of stepping stone our way into much larger kind of chronic liver disease indications as well.

How prevalent is what you’re doing in other disease areas like, for example, heart disease and things like that? Or is this something that you’re already pioneering from a liver perspective?

It’s fair to say we’re really pioneering this concept of testing out drugs on whole organs that can be used for transplant as a new way of thinking about translational development, for getting medicines into the clinic. I think I think that’s fair to say. That we’re doing a lot of really exciting science to help get us there and pioneering in the liver.

And there are two, I think questions, from that. The one is, could this be done for heart disease? Could someone take discarded or unusable hearts for transplant and then test out medicines there? Absolutely. And we would, you know, celebrate anyone who takes a similar approach and really pioneers it in another disease area. And we may even, you know, down the road with sufficient resources, start thinking about can we do the same thing we’ve done for liver, for other disease areas as well? It’s sort of a longer-term strategy. 

But then the other question is, is there anything that we’re doing in liver disease that actually could have an impact in the heart disease setting? 

Something that people don’t really I didn’t really think a lot about until I got more into this field is that the body is so interconnected, right? All of our internal organs are there. They’re not independent entities that we’re completely inside out. They all affect each other in a very, very collective way. 

And actually, one of the things you realize as you start to study the liver is that if you can improve liver health, so improve liver metabolism, improve the ability to break down fats and sort of monitor blood pressure and so forth, you actually, by virtue of doing that have a much better impact on heart health. Because your circulatory system is cleaner, you’re under less stress.

Oftentimes you can think about reducing the risk of heart attacks by improving your liver, which is kind of the engine of your metabolism or the brain or your metabolism. So there are all these additional positive impacts that you can have by studying and doing and doing good liver disease, which hasn’t been known to be able to do before.

That’s all part of the thinking that’s going on within alcohol.

Hugely important area. As we said a moment ago. How closely are you associated with some of the big pharma and biotech companies? Do you see those guys are, you know, deeply competitive or the market or partners of OchreBio? 

It’s a really weird sector in some ways, when you think about tech and others, in that your competitor becomes your partner, becomes your competitor, and becomes your partner (again). 

It’s so interconnected that because the development timeline for medicines to get to patients is so long and so costly, you have to work together to figure out ways to get these things forward.

Though there are others working in different approaches to liver disease that could be considered preventative products, ultimately we’ll likely lean on a large pharma as we get further down our development path to help us manufacture-at-scale, and commercialize and scale the products that we’re discovering now. 

Hopefully, get them to as many people as far and wide across the globe as we talked about at the beginning. Because it is a local and global issue and there’s only so much, you know, machine power a small company has really to reach that kind of wider audience.

We definitely will collaborate with larger partners. We haven’t done a lot of it today. We’ve done some small projects with Big Pharma, but we’ve been very independent thus far. But I would hope to see that change as we mature as an organization, and as our products mature as therapeutics.

Very interesting. So if you think about it and correct me if I’m wrong, you took $30 million in Series A, right?

That’s right, yeah.

How many investors participated in the round?

So we’ve got an unusual table actually in that way. We’ve got a quite a wide range of different investors that we bring in. And look, I think it’s great because a lot of folks that we brought in even are entrepreneurs themselves or people who’ve been sort of founded companies themselves and help to grow similar businesses in the health care space. 

Even though they might be small investors in the grand scheme of the $30 million, they can have an outsized impact on the company by virtue of providing counsel, advice or introductions and so forth.

We probably had close to 20 to 30 investors all in, and that includes some of the more individual sorts of personalities who contributed to the round as well. But it was four or five large investors that made up most of the round.

It sounds like a massive undertaking. What does Series A get you to? What point do you need more and what’s you’re strategy for profitability as an organization, where are you at with that kind of journey?

Every business needs to be thinking about how you’re going to ask for all this money and do all this work. How are you going to make money? 

So for us, our journey and our delivering our milestones with Series A financing, it’s really to continue the discovery process to the point of nominating a few drug candidates for human testing.

So do all of the preclinical research needed to really move products actually now into the clinic, which is a really big milestone and transition point for a company like ourselves. We’re almost there actually in the next few months where we’re going to begin nominating drug candidates for final, what’s called IND-enabling studies. They are the final workups before we go through regulatory approval for a human to human testing.

That’s a really exciting sort of milestone to be heading into. And then the subsequent Series B financing that we’ll do will be really to move those medicines through human testing, prove out the concept, prove out the thesis that we can find new biology, validate new biology. Make better medicines, and then subsequent to that will it will look to raise money to bring additional products into clinical testing for a wider range of diseases.

You mentioned. Things like heart disease, is there anything we could do beyond just sort of liver transplantation, to begin with? And in terms of how we ultimately sort of make our pay back all our investors. Ultimately, the likely scenario is that we would partner along the way to sell some of our research or sell some of our discoveries to a larger partner or ultimately get acquired by a large pharmaceutical.

That’s very typical in the biotechnology space, where you do a lot of the discovery research and then ultimately get acquired by a larger partner. 

What I would love to see happen, and this is a little bit speculative, is that we build a really big differentiated business and go the whole way and build up multiple products that go on to impact lives at a really large scale.

There’s been a lot of change in the pharmaceutical industry at large where there are some new start-up companies that have gone on to great sizes. I mean, people have heard of Moderna because of the vaccines and everything, but there are companies like Vertex that 20 years ago were tiny little companies like us, and 20 years later have bigger market caps than GSK, they’re massive organizations. 

I’d love for OchreBio to be a European or a UK example of a company that really grows and builds up great people, that builds great products and that is a sort of a new age big pharma company.

So let’s see if we have the next kind of a couple of decades to play out. But that’s the vision.

It’s phenomenal and inspiring to hear about your ambition. So, yeah, absolutely take on the world, take on a hugely important challenge and yeah, build a business. I mean that is the fundamental of a lot of dreams people have when they start out. So I know it’s refreshing to hear the kind of long-term play. 

Yeah I think so, and you know it drives the economy, creates amazing value for the people that work here and their families and the ecosystem and society at large. You know, I think we need some more entrepreneurial energy in this part of the world to really compete at a global level. So that’s sort of the thesis.

That’s great to hear. Now, I think we were actually initially connected because we were doing some research and engagement with Oxford scaleups. We’ve seen a significant trend of kind of scaling organizations and funding actually in the last 12 months in Oxford as a location.

What was Oxford been like for you in terms of, you know, home base?

I’m guessing you’ve got access to some strong talent network around that. How have you found that the scale-up journey up until this point in Oxfordshire?

I think Oxford is a phenomenal place to start a company. There are amazingly intelligent people in this part of the world, way smarter than me, way smarter than me, which is intimidating to go to work. But it’s great to be able to recruit such hardworking, motivated and intelligent people. That’s a really big value add for the space.

In addition, there’s a lot of support, and this beginning to build a bit of a community for life sciences companies around the sector. That sort of, you know, formation of community and networks has a sort of kind of catalytic effect where you start sharing learnings, and grow as an ecosystem.

So, having more and more companies build and grow in this ecosystem will just drive more and more energy and lessons learned and sort of more battle scars to share across the overall community itself. I’ve had a really positive experience. The only thing I would say is there’s not a lot of scale of capital in Oxford.

There’s a bit of startup capital, But there isn’t that depth of sort of scale of capital and a lot of that still is really in the US. You got to be thinking, for us, if you’re going to have these ambitions that we just talked about, how do you fund those ambitions? And really you’re going to fund them through US investors, typically. 

So that’s why we try to build a bridge to having a site in the US and having some of our leadership team on our board in the US. It all that sort of helps, I think, to achieve the ambitions we set out.

Where would be a kind of a natural landing spot for you guys in the U.S? Is that kind of an East Coast? 

Yeah, well, we have a site, we have a research group in New York, actually. Which was a bit of an unusual choice, (because) a lot of the biotech activity is out of Boston, and it’s such a competitive ecosystem in Boston. It’s so overpriced and on top of each other.

We kind of did an assessment where we wanted to position ourselves New York was sort of a blossoming biotech sector. It’s sort of nascent. And we thought getting our boots on the ground in a place that’s sort of taken off, is a nice way to not get chewed up by the sharks. In a place like Boston, you are able to find your own niche and grow with the growth ecosystem itself, and it’s a cool city too.

Of course it is. No, I think there’s a lot to be said for that in finding kind of a softer landing spot and having less of the competitive edge when just as you’re fledgling and getting started. I think it makes a lot of sense. But as you say, there’s also a lot of talent available in New York and the East Coast. Boston to New York isn’t a huge stretch probably, by any imagination.

Exactly right.

What is the next four to 6 to 12 months look like, Jack? What was what kind of priority for you guys?

Yeah, priority number one is getting our drug candidate nominated to move into sort of clinical readiness mode, and really transition the company from discovery through to impacting patients at scale with differentiated products. That’s a really exciting milestone for the business. 

The other thing we’re doing a lot of right now, which is starting to bear some interesting fruits is business development with large pharma.

I mentioned we haven’t done any major deals to date with the pharmaceutical partners, but we think it’s about around the right (time) we are around the stage of maturity now where we can more seriously engage and collaborate in discussions. So, we’re having some really promising conversations with large pharma about ways to collaborate, to move forward with our technology and our products.

You mentioned the kind of advisory board a moment ago. Is that something you’re building or does that come via investors?

Yeah, I know we have a very, very rich sort of scientific advisory board of expertise across the liver disease spectrum. Then we have a board of directors which provides smart governance support for the company. Between the two of those, we’re probably the most advised company in Oxford. I’d say we have we’ve got tons of external advisors, which is great. We bring really smart people into the organization that way.

What have you enjoyed most so far on your journey to this point? 

It’s a really hard job and it forces you to have to adapt to the role. I think being a CEO and a founder really necessitates a certain type of person. You got to (be able) separate yourself. And I felt I’ve grown into the role a lot and kind of been on a personal journey to get more comfortable with what it requires. And as the company changes, the role changes. 

So while it was necessary for me to be a real sales guy at the beginning and tell the story, the vision helped to raise money. As the company’s gotten bigger and more, more stable, we’re making big product decisions. Now it’s more about being a strategist and being an excellent communicator, making sure everyone knows what’s going on and making sure we’re all sort of swimming in the same direction towards the one goal. 

I think that journey has been a really interesting one. Just a rewarding experience to meet and work with such inspiring, motivated, highly intelligent people towards a really big, ambitious goal.

I always thought, you know, if you’re going to go for something, go for the big one, you know. 

If we’re going to try to solve the problem, solve a global problem like this. That keeps me motivated and that’s been really, really fun. 

If there are any aspiring entrepreneurs listening, just know it’s a hard job and you’re going to be we’re working really hard all the time.

Absolutely! Final question from my side. Given what you’ve just described, thinking about someone going on that journey, maybe to get to even seed or its financing or investment. What’s one piece of advice you would give?

I think it’s all about relationships with the people you’re in the day-to-day with. Invest heavily in the relationships and be really candid and honest about what you’re feeling and thinking as you’re in the weeds in the trenches together, because you have got to you got to get on. 

You got to be able to roll up and work together or it becomes unnecessarily difficult, and then also ask for advice.

There are a lot of really smart people who’ve done this before and a lot of those people are really kind. You know, they can empathize with your struggle and the journey you are going to go on. So build a personal advisory board. Even beyond the company, and peer mentors as well, are great because they’re in it with you there and having the same challenges even with a different company, different sector. It’s all people, you know. A lot of those lessons learned are super transferable and then have fun. 

I think the other thing is you can get so wound up about this issue, and this person doesn’t like it. It’s a long (process) as you’re going to be here for a long time. It’s a really hard job. Enjoy the little moments, and when you get a win celebrate them and I have a bit of fun with it because it’s hard.

Well, well said. And I do think that someone like yourself is on that journey with such a huge goal at the end of it. 

Being able to have fun along the way makes perfect sense. If you can do that and genuinely enjoy it along the way, then you’ve got something. I think you’ve found your calling in life.