Can you tell us more about Mira Life Science Ventures?
Mira LSV is a new organisation that was set up to specifically fund and develop early-stage innovations in life and health sciences. As a team, we are predominantly product developers in the areas of therapeutics, medical devices and diagnostics. We have significant fund management experience, but we are also seasoned innovators and developers. As such, we envisioned the need for a better model for early-stage innovation funding.
Venture Capital is a vital part of the funding landscape but increasingly the size of checks that they have to write are not appropriate for early-stage innovations and the timeframes the funds demand are not appropriate for funding early stage technology. We wanted to build something that was more appropriate for funding that first phase of development of medical technology.
What is the business model?
MIRA is structured as a US C-corp to give maximum flexibility to drive early-stage innovation forward. We can license IP and incubate it within MIRA. We can spin companies out or take them public. We can take equity in the way that VCs do, or we can syndicate with VCs. This gives us maximum flexibility.
Mira is structured as an evergreen fund allowing us to be patient with the capital we invest. It also means that we don’t have to divest those programs that have the potential to earn significant royalties in the future.
We could generate revenue in 10- or 15-years’ time through royalties of products on the market that VC funds would have had to sell to someone like Royalty Pharma at a discount at the close of their funds. This allows us to take advantage of the long-term profitability of our early-stage Investments.
Essentially, it allows people who are investing in Mira to participate in the complex life sciences sector in a way that mitigates the risk for them because we’re very science and R&D focused.
We are very efficient in the way that we develop the programs, and should they fail, they fail fast and cheaply, allowing us to enrich our portfolio with companies who are more likely to succeed, a risk mitigated approach to life and health science investment.
Do you have a focus on medical devices?
We want a portfolio that is diversified across medical devices, diagnostics, digital health and therapeutics. The appeal of devices is that the regulatory pathway is more straightforward. The time to market is sooner and the investment required to reach the value inflection point is less.
My co-founder and MIRA CEO, Kurt Gehlsen, was involved in Research Corporation Technologies (RCT), a not-for-profit evergreen fund. At RCT, Kurt’s team would invest circa two million dollars into a medical device and then create 20 million dollars’ worth of value in the space of two years.
If we can do that at MIRA four or five times in the course of two or three years, we can develop a significant revenue back into the company and to the investors. That’s a very reproducible model for us with quite a low barrier to market entry.
Can you share more about your team?
We are a global endeavour. I’m based in the UK but we are headquartered in Miami, Florida, where my co-founding partner and CEO of Mira Dr. Kurt Gehlsen is based.
Kurt has a 35-year, track record in life sciences. He has worked in big pharma and start-ups, has two approved products, managed all aspects of product development and was part of the leadership of Maxim Pharmaceuticals, where he took them public and developed one of the first immuno oncology drugs on the market. Kurt then joined RCT, based in Tucson Arizona, where he was part of the senior management of their Evergreen fund for 13 years.
Our chairman Mel Rothberg also has a 40 year plus career in life and health sciences. He was part of the team with Dow Chemical who developed the first dialysis cartridge in the 70s. Mel’s experience has been global having run European and Far East commercial and operating entities in life sciences.
Why was Mira founded?
Mira takes inspiration primarily from RCT, where Kurt Gehlsen worked for 13 years. RCT is a unique organisation and is set-up as a not-for-profit Evergreen fund, which invests, develops, and incubates early-stage inventions.
It was founded in the late 80s with a 25-million-dollar loan and when Kurt left in 2018, they had generated two billion dollars in revenue from their projects, returning over a billion dollars to academics and inventors and growing the fund to over $500m.
They’ve managed to achieve that because through their model, they in-licensed the key patents around the Shingrex vaccine which was sold to GSK and the Vimpat drug for epilepsy – both billion-dollar drugs.
They helped develop cis- and carbo-platin which was licensed to BMS, the PSA test for prostate cancer, the Pichia platform which has over 70 products on the market with more than 300 licensees. All of these opportunities were managed through the RCT model and are currently generating significant revenues.
What we’re trying to do is to replicate that model but now with investors in mind. We are looking to raise 250 million dollars in exchange for shares in our C-Corp. We will then deploy that capital in much the same way that RCT deployed it to generate all those revenues.
The difference here is that when we operate that fund, we won’t be employing a 2% management fee and 20% carry venture model. Unlike a VC or a private Equity Firm, when revenue comes back into Mira, it will go two ways. 50% will go back to the company to create the Evergreen structure and 50% will go to pay the investors their evergreen return. In addition, the investors own the full enterprise value of Mira based on their equity holding.
So that’s what we’re trying to replicate – early-stage investment, development, incubation, which will de-risk these assets so they can succeed in follow-on funding and eventual commercialization.
Why did you decide to go down this route of being an entrepreneur with MIRA?
I’ve been in Life Sciences for over 20 years now. I started as a scientist for big Pharma with Schering-Plough and GSK before going into biotech where I learned how to run companies. I learned how to raise funds, how to manage people, how to negotiate licenses in and out.
For the last seven years as an entrepreneur and as a consultant, I’ve built and advised companies which allowed me to see the whole process, from developing therapeutics, through diagnostics and devices. My career has allowed me to see how the whole system works and to understand how it can be improved.
I believe with Mira we have the chance to refine that process by taking capital and deploying it in a way where you can build companies in a very deliberate way.
Can you share some career highlights?
My career has had several phases. Being able to work for a large pharmaceutical company like GSK was really important in my early career. It gave me that strong foundation to understand how drug development works, how therapeutic areas are approached, the strategy, the techniques and the people that are important in that process.
Being able to build companies is also a real highlight. I was involved in building Almac Discovery which was a new business unit for a large and successful pharmaceutical services company. Building a company within an organization was a real risk for that company and I found it very exciting.
A highlight of my latter part of my career is my involvement in policy. I have a role as Chair of an organization called Matrix which is Northern Ireland’s Science and Technology policy expert panel where I am able to influence direct government policy. It is satisfying to be able to convert all my experience in industry, to help the government perform better.
What is your view on failure?
It’s inevitable. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve failed in my career, but you can’t learn how to succeed unless you fail. It’s all a process of iteration.
You continue to engage in the cycle of improvement. You try something and it fails. As a scientist it’s all about running experiments. Can I achieve this thing by doing it this way?
I’ve got halfway there, and this worked but that didn’t. I’m not doing the thing that didn’t work again, but I’ll concentrate on the thing that did work.
Failure is a really healthy thing. You just have to take time to analyze why things failed and then build upon the things that worked because in any given project, things will fail, and things will have worked despite the overall results may or may not be what you wanted it to be.
Any lessons learned that you could share?
The most important thing that I’ve learned is to always be open to new directions and better ways of doing things with a group of people that you trust and have chemistry with.
Be open-minded and collaborative. That’s the key.