UT Southwestern spinout company Optologix, LLC, earns spot in nationally ranked healthcare accelerator
Optologix, a biotechnology startup co-founded by former UT Southwestern researchers Drs. Laura Motta-Mena and Kevin Gardner, was selected to participate in the 2016 class of Health Wildcatters, a leading healthcare startup accelerator program in Dallas. Now in its fourth year, Health Wildcatters was recently recognized as the top healthcare accelerator in the Southwest, and number 3 in the U.S. overall, in MIT’s Seed Accelerator Rankings.
Dr. Motta-Mena, CEO of Optologix, received her Ph.D. from UT Southwestern Medical Center in 2010. She continued working at UT Southwestern as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr. Gardner’s group in the Department of Biophysics until 2014 when Dr. Gardner was recruited to the City University of New York. Dr. Gardner was a Professor at UT Southwestern for 15 years and is currently the Director of the Structural Biology Initiative at CUNY’s Advance Science Research Center; he’s also CSO for Optologix.
Working together at UT Southwestern, Drs. Motta-Mena and Gardner developed a novel optogenetics-based technology that is now the basis for Optologix. Optogenetics is an emerging field in biology that involves the adaptation of naturally occurring light-sensing (photosensor) proteins for other uses in biomedical research. The first successful application of optogenetics was in neuroscience, where the introduction of a photosensor gene from algae into specific neurons in a mouse brain allowed brain circuits to be controlled by simply turning on a light.
According to Dr. Motta-Mena, the number of photosensors found in nature is estimated to be in the hundreds, with many of these having different functions. “If we think about it, light is actually an ideal stimulus—it’s non-toxic, non-invasive, and it can be easily controlled in space and time”, Dr. Motta-Mena said. She added, “The focus of Optologix is to engineer natural photosensors into new optogenetic tools with broader applications in biotech and pharma.”
The company’s first product, called LITE Switch, is a research reagent that uses blue light instead of drugs to control gene/protein expression in cells and animals. “Conventional tools require the addition of the antibiotic tetracycline to cells to regulate gene expression. Unfortunately this drug causes many side effects in cells that lead to false positive results in preclinical target validation studies. As a result, the wrong therapeutic target can end up being followed into clinical studies,” Dr. Gardner said. Mistakes like these contribute to both delays and costs of therapeutic drug development.
Dr. Motta-Mena said the LITE Switch has the potential to increase the effectiveness of the target validation process as well as enable new avenues of investigation not previously possible with standard drug-based tools. Proof of concept and application studies on LITE Switch were published in Nature Chemical Biology by Drs. Motta-Mena and Gardner in 2014. Since then, the technology has been evaluated in over 60 academic and industrial laboratories worldwide.
As part of their participation in the accelerator program, Optologix will receive $30,000 of seed funding from the Health Wildcatters’ investors and have the opportunity to receive up to $350,000 in follow-on funding. Health Wildcatters also provides office space, resources and access to mentors for 12 weeks. The program will culminate on November 16, 2016 at a “Pitch Day” at the Majestic Theater in Dallas, where all ten participating startups will present their company pitches to investors and the community.
According to Dr. Hubert Zajicek, CEO and cofounder of Health Wildcatters, Optologix is the first UT Southwestern spinout company to be selected for the Health Wildcatters accelerator. Prior to starting the program, Dr. Zajicek was on faculty at UT Southwestern in the Departments of Internal Medicine and Cell Biology.
“We are thrilled to be part of the 2016 class of Health Wildcatters. We plan to take full advantage of this time to gather input from program mentors and experienced entrepreneurs to scaling our product and business,” Dr. Motta-Mena said. For more information on Optologix visit www.optologixllc.com. More information on Health Wildcatters can be found at www.healthwildcatters.com.
