By: Fitzsimons Innovation Community
At Fitzsimons Innovation Community, we get extremely excited when new organizations put down roots on our campus. But sometimes, these new Community members aren’t really new at all. We can explain. A couple months ago here on the blog, we talked about CU Innovations, and how it provides a path to commercialization for the breakthrough work coming out of the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. In essence, it’s a way for new discoveries happening through the course of research and training to evolve into new organizations and make their way to market. RefinedScience, a high-tech biosciences company that uses unique access to and analysis of specialized data to inform drug development and discovery, is the newest Community member on the Fitzsimons campus and a perfect example of a CU Innovations success story.
We recently spoke with the leadership team from RefinedScience just as they’re about to complete their move from CU Innovations’ Startup Foundry in Bioscience 1 to their new home in Bioscience 3. We talked to them about what they do, how they got their start, and what the future looks like as they relocate to their own lab and workspace. CEO Erik Johnson explains how RefinedScience is changing the way data is used to improve patient outcomes. “Basically what we do is bring together as much data as we can using fully curated datasuites for a specific disease. It’s complicated work, but the insights we’re able to generate allow us to identify drugs that may not have gone through to commercialization yet and find the specific biomarkers that will allow them to work for patients who need them.” From this deep data analysis, they’re able to design smarter clinical trials that can move previously stalled drugs through the clinical stage and on to market where they can start helping patients. With the proprietary technology they’ve developed to do this, they’re shaving millions of dollars and multiple years off the process.
When RefinedScience started as part of CU Innovations, it was seen as an aid for physicians making decisions in the clinic. “It’s been incredible to be a part of RefinedScience as it has evolved from a clinical decision support tool into a whole new precision medicine platform and research organization. What started as a small project is now its own entity making big impacts for clinical trials and patient outcomes,” Kevin Wehber, Senior Director of Product Operations, tells us. Precision is a key word in what RefinedScience does, as their skilled research team lead by Chief Innovation Officer Clay Smith, M.D. is able to create insights at the single-cell level.
While most organizations in this space have to purchase less-comprehensive datasets from hospitals, RefinedScience, because of their continued strong partnership with CU and the UCHealth hospital system can bring three sets of data together for analysis. They use clinical data and purchased data much like other organizations do, but RefinedScience also has full access to the real-world data coming out of the UCHealth system, including access to patient samples. This is what allows them to perform single-cell, multi-omics analysis, thereby monitoring exactly how each cell reacts and changes as it’s going through treatment. In business, such strong relationships with academic institutions are extremely rare, but when your company was born from that institution, suddenly the playing field is different. Where other companies have a ten-year forecast for getting drugs through trials and to market, RefinedScience is able to cut that to three or four years, getting much needed drugs into the hands of patients sooner.
Just because Fitzsimons Innovation Community is right across the street from CU Innovations doesn’t mean it was the immediate choice for the new RefinedScience headquarters. The leadership team looked at other cities like San Diego and Cambridge, Massachusetts, known communities for life sciences incubation and development, but when it came down to it, Fitzsimons Innovation Community was the perfect fit. It allowed them to remain close to the team of experts they consult with on the CU campus and to have custom lab space in the right size for their initial location, knowing that the room they need to grow is available to them when they’re ready. With new hires on the horizon, a location here in Colorado also gives them access to the highly educated talent pool our state is known for. Johnson explains it like this: “We were born out of this University and we continue to have extremely strong ties to it. We’ve obviously evolved and now have our own identity, too, but we’ve learned that bringing the best of academia and the best of industry together can create the best company, so we never want to lose our connection to the academia side.”
In addition to the proximity to their academic partners, the RefinedScience leadership team mentions a list of other Fitzsimons Innovation Community amenities that solidify their choice every day. “The Fitzsimons team genuinely cares about every single one of their companies,” says Johnson. “It comes through in every interaction that they’re very invested in the success of their Community members. I don’t think we would have felt that if we’d chosen to build somewhere else. It’s a complete intangible to be in a space where they care about the relationship and not just the space they’re renting to you. We also couldn’t find a turnaround time like the one we’ve had here. To go from ‘we want to open an office and lab’ to moving in within six months is unheard of, and yet, here we are ready to occupy our new space.”
So, what does the future look like for RefinedScience in their new Bioscience 3 home? The company began with a focus on hematology and blood diseases, specifically Acute Myeloid Leukemia which led to a spinout company, OncoVerity. Now, as they grow, RefinedScience is focused on expanding their datasuites into other diseases, including solid tumor research and the autoimmune space. Growing into these new areas provides the opportunity for additional spinoff companies and partnerships with pharmaceutical companies. Johnson says, “The OncoVerity spinout allowed us to demonstrate our proof of concept. Now we can continue to expand knowing our technology is making a marked difference in meeting previously unmet patient needs.”
Getting their start at CU Innovations’ Startup Foundry lends the new RefinedScience lab space a grassroots ambience. It’s a new home, but they’re still surrounded by the experts and consultants they know and trust, plus a campus with the amenities they’ve come to love. With three or four employees working in their lab, it is a small organization making huge inroads into data analysis and drug trials. While they commend Fitzsimons Innovation Community for their efforts in relationship building and collaboration, we applaud them right back for keeping patient care and disease eradication at the heart of everything they do. Symbiotic relationships have become a tradition on our campus, and we’re proud to be part of this one with RefinedScience.
