Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and a new-to-town biotech firm are formalizing a collaborative agreement both groups say will help faster develop and spinout research from the medical center into new companies.
Cincinnati Children’s, the region’s largest health system, and Orange Grove Bio, a preclinical drug investment and development firm, said their partnership will advance the development and commercialization of novel therapeutics by supporting the translation of scientific discoveries made by researchers at the medical center. The collaboration, formally announced Wednesday morning, aims to increase entrepreneurship and education as well as boost promising technologies emerging from Cincinnati Children’s.
The two organizations have been in contact for the better part of a year, Marc Appel, Orange Grove Bio’s CEO, told me — even before Orange Grove finalized its HQ move from New York to the University of Cincinnati’s 1819 Innovation Hub in November.
The partnership has since hit an “inflection point,” he said, as Orange Grove is getting close to spinning out several pieces of technology from Cincinnati Children's.
“We have identified Greater Cincinnati as one of the most promising up-and-coming hubs of biopharmaceutical research within the U.S., and the scientists at Cincinnati Children’s are one of the primary drivers of this innovation,” Appel said in a release. “By working with Cincinnati Children’s and other institutions across Ohio, we can help accelerate the translation of the breakthrough discoveries happening everyday within laboratories throughout the state.”
Orange Grove, a holding company, works with universities, academic medical centers and entrepreneurs outside Boston and San Francisco, or traditional biotech hubs, to find new treatments and technologies to spin off into subcompanies.
Orange Grove currently has more than 50 partnerships across the country.
Under terms of its collaboration with Children’s, Orange Grove Bio will provide guidance and support to Cincinnati Children’s Innovation Ventures, which seeks to commercialize technology invented or developed at the hospital. The efforts will be focused in the areas of autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, oncology, and cell and gene therapies.
Ryan Fox, Orange Grove Bio’s chief business operations officer, who leads the firm’s Cincinnati office, will advise on the potential of emerging technologies from the Innovation Ventures pipeline.
In addition, Orange Grove Bio leaders will be available to speak with interested post-doctoral students about internship opportunities and offer seminars for investigators and researchers.
Orange Grove’s proximity to Cincinnati Children’s — the organizations are less than 1 mile apart — will offer several advantages, allowing its team to directly interact with researchers, Fox said. It’s one of the factors that makes this particular collaboration unique.
“Cincinnati Children's has a wealth of fantastic science that goes unnoticed. While we focus on Midwest, there's nothing easier than having something essentially a couple blocks away,” Fox told me. “That sets the stage to keep these programs local. The more we can work with them, the more biotech companies we can create and keep in the ecosystem in Cincinnati.”
Orange Grove Bio started in Cincinnati with a small team. The firm plans to continue to increase its on-the-ground presence by onboarding new employees from the area — it plans to hire across both scientific and business functions as well as build out its legal team.
Appel said the firm currently employs 10-15 in Cincinnati and 30 companywide. He expects to double that count locally by the end of the year, with plans to double again in 2023.
“We’d love to be one of the largest biotech players in this ecosystem, and we're going to be hiring to accomplish that over time,” he said.
Abram Gordon, VP of Cincinnati Children’s Innovation Ventures, said the collaboration will allow the organizations to operate more efficiently while “helping to elevate the stature of the region.”
Cincinnati Children’s, a $2.7 billion nonprofit with a workforce of more than 16,500, has a rich history of developing new innovations, from the Sabin oral polio vaccine to another vaccine to combat rotavirus, and the first practical heart-lung machine. Nearly a third of its employees are engaged in research.
Most recently, Kurome Therapeutics and Enable Injections, two Greater Cincinnati-based startups founded based on technologies that originated at Cincinnati Children’s, raised $15 million and $215 million, respectively.
“We are excited Orange Grove Bio is planting roots in Cincinnati,” Gordon said in the release. “Our researchers are advancing novel science that has the potential to make a meaningful difference. By collaborating, we are building a bridge that will enable more rapid translation of our researchers’ discoveries, accelerating their advancement into clinical development and toward the commercial market.”
Appel said it was too early to put a dollar value on the collaboration. That would materialize as Orange Grove gets closer to finalizing licensing or option agreements. Any subcompanies it creates would also operate in stealth mode for a period of time before being publicly announced.
“We’re getting close, which is a great place to be,” he said. “We can really start focusing more on the development and less on the incubation process, if you will. Historically, there’s been one success story (out of Cincinnati Children’s) every handful of years. We're hopeful there could be a yearly cadence of success stories as our partnership continues to flourish.”
