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Rimon Therapeutics’ story began about 10 years ago with an unexpected observation in the laboratory of Dr. Michael Sefton at the University of Toronto. During an experiment, Sefton noticed blood vessels growing around medical polymers — materials that at the time were intended to be used as benign implants. Sefton and Dr. May then wondered if the materials could be tweaked to have a therapeutic benefit. Shortly thereafter, Rimon Therapeutics was founded in 2000. Rimon went on to develop Theramers — polymers that give devices therapeutic drug-like benefits — taking it from early concept to successful human clinical trials. Although the company has yet to generate revenue, it has received rave reviews for its work, including being named “Most Promising Early Stage Biotechnology Company” by BIOTECanada in 2006. Rimon plans to introduce Theramers to the market through a global wound care company later this year and ultimately go public. We asked co-founder May six questions.
• What is the biggest challenge currently facing Rimon and what are you doing about it?
Raising capital is always a challenge, especially in the Canadian context. It’s probably our greatest challenge. We raised capital initially out of Europe. It was a fund that came to Canada looking for new technologies out of the universities. And their initial model was to invest in university research. Our proposal was, ‘Don’t invest in our research; invest in us as a company.’ And it was very serendipitous that they were looking for new, innovative material technologies and we were looking for financing. And it allowed for a good, strong foundation. And then we’ve continued to build strong relationships with high net-worth individuals and have raised about $5.5 million to date.
Certainly one thing I’ve learned is there’s no standard way to raise money. You have to be incredibly persistent and find people or institutions who ultimately can understand your value proposition. And I think we’ve learned that the high net-worth individuals or angel investors are very good sources of funding for early stage companies. And because our technologies are typically closer to market because they’re not drugs we can do a lot with less money. So we’ve been able to move concepts forward, and run right through initial clinical trials, with a relatively modest amount of financing. It’s not always about the amount of money you have but how you spend it and how you leverage resources.
• Who else do you feel is doing innovative work and in what way?
I think an area where Canada has been very strong is in regenerative medicine. Combining cells, materials and drugs and engineering how they interact to create new tissues and new organs to replace those that are not functioning and need to be regenerated. We have, locally in Toronto, a number of researchers, stem cells, materials and companies. I think we can be a major centre of excellence in regenerating tissue in the next 10, 20 years. Down in the U.S., there are researchers that have created artificial bladders, simple human organs, from tissue engineering. Robert Langer at MIT and a number of his colleagues have been able to grow ears on the backs of mice. But taking those research results and creating products out of them is a real challenge because you have to source cells. It’s my belief that stem cells will be a key component to future therapies. But the expectation that genetic engineering and stem cells and tissue engineering is going to solve our problems quickly is wrong. But eventually it certainly will. Twenty or 30 years from now we’ll be able to create a heart in a Petri dish and implant it into someone. And we’ll have thousands of new therapies that spin out of that work.
• How would you describe your leadership style/philosophy?
I tend to lead by rolling up my sleeves and getting the team together. Everyone has to be creative. Everyone has to do jobs that they’re not necessarily hired for to pitch in. And we have to be adaptable and innovative. Innovation is really creativity with value. And so whenever we get together as a group and we brainstorm we’re always thinking about how what we’re doing creates value. So if you bring your group together and you just share and you get the same thing you’re not really creating any synergy—you’re not creating any value. So it’s about bringing different people together to be creative. Personally, I read a lot to try to get ideas from various different industries and sciences. I’m always trying to borrow ideas and metaphors.
• What are the most exciting opportunities that exist for Rimon and Theramers?
The opportunity or value proposition is to be able to have Theramers developed as devices over device timelines and costs. We are trying to avoid incorporating drugs in our products so that the regulatory pathway is more simple and compressed. And because polymers are plastics they have very versatile chemistry and can be made in many different forms and shapes and we can take advantage of the versatility of that chemistry and have Theramers applied very broadly. Our lead technology currently is a polymer that inhibits certain groups of enzymes called MMPs that chew apart tissue. It’s used to treat chronic wounds, which are diabetic ulcers, bed soars—wounds that take often years to heal in the elderly. So this material binds and inhibits these enzymes so wounds don’t chew themselves apart faster than they can heal—because they are typically trapped in these chaotic cycles. The other opportunity for us is because Theramers can get to market faster and less expensively then drugs there’s likely some opportunities for Third World applications where the cost of drugs means that populations there don’t get innovative treatments. In the longer term, because Theramers have such broad applications, one potential for Riman is to be acquired by a large medical device or biopharm company.
• You’ve led the start up and growth of Riman. Based on your experience, what are the pros and cons of being an entrepreneur in Canada?
The cons are I think there’s a less entrepreneurial nature here—although that’s changing. When I started Riman my peers wondered what I was doing. Now I have many students coming to me and talking about starting companies. So I think Canada’s becoming entrepreneurial. But in general it’s nothing like when you visit some of the major entrepreneurial centres inside of the U.S. like Boston or Southern California, where there’s just so much excitement, so much money, and so much risk tolerance to drive these things forward. We have great infrastructure to do basic research. We have a great collection in, for instance, downtown Toronto of research institutions, hospitals, and Bay St. We’re going to have to pull all of those strengths together if we’re going to compete with the rest of the world.
Another con would be it’s hard to find people to do specialized jobs in biotech. My opinion is that a lot of these people leave after they’re well educated. But my experience is if you give them a job here they stay. If they take a stint down in the States they build lives there and it’s harder to bring them back. And so it’s, again, about making certain that the source of good, highly qualified employees coming out of our educational institutions are recruited by new spin-offs that are creating jobs. We talk about tech transfer—I think the most important tech transfer is actually through people. It’s really quite easy to come up with an invention. What’s harder is getting people to make those inventions and to develop them into real products.
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