S1, E2: Ochre Bio with CEO/Co-founder Jack O'Meara and liver expert Dr Scott Friedman, Mount Sinai

In this episode of Raising Biotech, Surani speaks with CEO and co-founder Jack O'Meara of Ochre Bio, a company dedicated to tackling the large and unsolved problem of complex and chronic liver diseases. Founded in 2019, Ochre raised an impressive $30 million after only three years in start-up mode and is now gearing up to take some of its drug candidates into the clinic. Surani speaks to Jack about his individual journey and the moment he met and decided to partner up with co-founder Dr Quin Wills. Jack discusses their light bulb idea of setting up a company to study the liver and develop novel and targeted gene therapies using human donor organs as preclinical models instead of mice. Jack talks about Ochre's fundraising journey in Europe vs US, his own experiences raising funds as a relatively young biotech founder and how the company successfully set up an organ "ICU" to conduct its research. Dr Scott Friedman, Dean of therapeutic discovery and Chief of the division of liver diseases at the Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai, joins the podcast to share his thoughts on Ochre's thesis and mission with siRNA gene therapies and its "deep phenotyping" approach. With 40 years of experience in the field, he's seen a lot of failure, so discusses what types of challenges Ochre will have to think about as they progress into human testing. Jack discusses next steps as the company moves towards the clinic -- which involves partnership talks, a Series B fundraising and narrowing down the first indication to test its medicines. Timestamps: 02:00 - CEO Jack O'Meara gives Ochre Bio's liver disease thesis 04:08 - Rewinding to Jack's back story and connecting with co-founder Dr Quin Wills 05:30 - Generating the "light bulb" moment of using discarded human donor organs for research 07:05 - Why liver disease, particularly NASH has seen so many catastrophic failures (Intercept) 08:38 - Quin and Jack search for investors and take roadshow to more "risk-friendly" US investors 10:25 - What it was like for Jack being such a young biotech entrepreneur and how that impacted fundraising 13:40 - Dr Scott Friedman (Mount Sinai) gives his take on Ochre's scientific thesis and mission 15:00 - After some initial logistical hiccups, Ochre builds its own "organ" ICU centre for testing 17:36 - Use of siRNA therapy and deep phenotyping approach to generate lead drug candidates 20:52 - A compelling strategy to de-risk trials, but potential challenges ahead to consider 24:45 - Partnership discussions and Series B plans to get drugs into the clinic 25:08 - Prioritizing "smaller" disease to tackle in first clinical trials 28:17 - Jack's visions in building Ochre into a large multi-product company in Europe. For any comments, questions, feedback or suggestions you can connect directly with Surani Fernando on LinkedIn or email: [email protected] Music composed by: Yrii Semchyshyn (Coma Media) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.