The Hatchery in Co Dublin is designed to help fledgeling firms lift off in a harsh commercial world, reports Dick Ahlstrom
Many universities boast an innovation centre which backs start-up companies. University College Dublin has one called The Hatchery, which will work to help fledgling firms take flight.
The Hatchery is a joint project between Smurfit School of Business, UCD and Cross Atlantic Partners. Smurfit School alumnus Gerry McCrory, of Cross Atlantic Partners, has donated $1 million (about €1 million) to establish The Hatchery, which shares space at the school's base in Blackrock, Co Dublin. It was opened in response to the problems encountered by early-stage seed and pre-seed companies in developing and commercialising their business ideas. Further funding is expected.
"It was set up to assist the development of new companies for graduates of the business school," states Pearse Cole, chief executive officer of Celtic Catalysts, a company established in 2000 and now being assisted by The Hatchery.
It is not meant to back small corner shops or firms looking to serve local markets. "You need to be addressing a large market opportunity and one with niche opportunities on global markets," Cole says.
The Smurfit School supports The Hatchery with offices, shared services and access to faculty and other university research and resources. The Hatchery typically provides seed funding of between €25,000 and €75,000, and participants gain access to expertise on The Hatchery's supervisory board. It provides help with marketing, business plan development and management structures.
For this help, The Hatchery would take an equity stake of about 15 per cent in any start-up. It currently supports five incubator companies, a figure which is expected to increase to eight by September.
The school is eager to promote entrepreneurship among its graduates. An important secondary function is to encourage the cross- fertilisation of the intellectual property and applied research capacity available at UCD. A good example of how this works is seen in Celtic Catalysts, which joined the flock in January of this year.
Cole heads the company; Dr Brian Kelly is business development manager; and the firm's chief technology officer, Dr Declan Gilheany, is also a UCD faculty member, an organic chemist who lectures and does research. "The university allows you a certain amount of time for this," says Gilheany.
As its name suggests, Celtic Catalysts is an Irish firm that finds and develops uses for novel catalysts. Its area of special interest is chiral chemistry, the study of the "handedness" of chemical compounds.
"Ordinarily, if you produce drugs in the lab they come in two forms. They are really like each other, but they have 'handedness', like your right hand and left hand," explains Gilheany. "You will usually find that only the one hand is the active drug."
Understanding the handedness of a new drug is essential, as proven in the Thalidomide tragedy. This drug was developed originally to help prevent morning sickness in pregnant women. One form of the drug did this well, but the other caused profound birth defects in foetuses.
"Ten years ago the US Food and Drug Administration decided on a policy that all new drugs should be made and tested in their two forms," says Gilheany. In fact, tests are conducted on three: the right and left forms and also a mix of the two. But doing three full clinical trials for safety and efficacy is very expensive.
"You choose not to do that, you choose to use the one that is most active," states Gilheany. The challenge then becomes how to get only one form of the compound, given that both arise naturally when chemicals are processed.
CELTIC Catalysts is pursuing the use of novel catalysts as a way to control drug formation. The idea is that the catalyst, which is only a facilitator of a reaction (and isn't consumed by the reaction), will encourage one form while blocking the other. "If you can get a catalyst that will direct the formation of the hand in the first place, that is a better way of doing things," says Gilheany.
The company is searching for useful catalysts, using a "robot", an €800,000 machine that conducts the thousands of reaction experiments that will uncover new catalysts for chiral drug production.
"It is called combinatory chemistry. What they mean by that is robot-controlled experimentation," says Gilheany. The company expects the system to handle 100,000 experiments a year. "It is prospecting. It is knowing where to look."
The team hopes to find catalysts that can control reactions to such an extent that an initial formulation will contain at least 95 per cent of the target drug form. It is then a straightforward matter to remove the remaining 5 per cent, which can be recycled back into production.