Since its fall 2021 launch, Memphis Inno — MBJ’s brand geared toward startups, technology, and innovation — has expanded its coverage of the local entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Memphis Inno's Startups to Watch highlights startups and founders who are breaking technological ground in their respective industries, with new ventures and innovative product offerings. Memphis Inno’s Startups to Watch for 2023 leaned into strengths of the local economy, with ventures selected from the medical device, logistics, and restaurant industries.
Startups to Watch features early stage companies figuring out how to get off the ground, and others that already have significant sources of funding and are looking to scale up. All are uniquely Memphis ventures.
SweetBio
In the new year, SweetBio took its bioengineered wound care product to market and swiftly sold all 1,000 units in its inventory. Now, it’s raising funds to make more, with the goal of bringing the amount it can manufacture from the hundreds to the thousands in the next six months.
By the end of 2023, the local startup wants to have the capacity to make a million units of its product.
“We have already received exponential demand from our first order,” said Kayla Rodriguez Graff, SweetBio’s co-founder and CEO. “And we need to manufacture more product.”
The product that’s created this demand is called Apis, which is derived from collagen and manuka honey. Many of the patients who use it have diabetic ulcers, venous ulcers, bedsores, and lesions at surgical sites, and studies show that the product has both helped close wounds and prevent amputations.
Apis gained FDA clearance in 2019, and that same year, Regional One Health's Center for Innovation made SweetBio a participant in its Healthcare Startup Access Incubator, to evaluate the clinical use case of its product. Now, the results of the study are being published in Wounds — a widely read clinical journal focused on wound care and research — and they seem to show the effectiveness of Apis.
Over the course of the evaluation, health care providers identified 43 patients and 47 wounds. Standard care was used to treat 20 of those wounds, while Apis was used to treat the other 27. And the average closure time for wounds healed with Apis was twice as fast as the standard treatment, with the Apis wounds being closed in just 7.4 weeks.
For comparison, the other wounds closed in 14.8 weeks.
As Rodriguez Graff and the SweetBio team are aware, however, the product won’t be impactful if it’s not accessible. So, they’re making an effort to get it into the home — a place where wound care products are rare.
“Home care is where care is going,” Rodriguez Graff said. “A lot of types of care have been able to transition into the home. But advanced wound care hasn’t made that transition yet.”
SweetBio is now looking to jump-start that transition. The initial 1,000 products it’s sold — as well as the thousands more it’s poised to sell — are set to go into people’s homes. The company’s commercial partner is MiroDX, which provides on-demand health care solutions, and together, they’re putting the Apis products in kits that come with everything patients need.
These kits should be easy to use, too.
“Just as the whole nation and the whole world learned how to do COVID tests at home, we have a technique guide that's just like that with images and visuals to help walk you through,” Rodriguez Graff said. “Advanced care doesn't need to be complicated, and it doesn't need to be expensive. And that’s what we’re showing."
