Jennifer Elisseeff is fascinated by the high-wire act of translating knowledge from the laboratory to the patent office to the clinic. Recently named one of MIT Technology Review’s “Top 100 Young Innovators” in technology and business, Elisseeff has just founded a company—CARTILIX—to manufacture and market tissue-engineering technologies developed in her Hopkins lab. “We closed our first round of financing in February 2005, and started leasing space for the lab and offices in June,” she says. “We’re creating a lot of momentum.”CARTILIX’s first product will be an injectable gel that attaches to existing knee tissue and promotes cell regeneration. The gel “scaffolding” anchors resulting new cartilage cells in place and provides a structure that allows them to mature and form functional tissue, mending what has been damaged or destroyed. The technology may fill in for some of the 200,000 knee replacement surgeries performed each year, staving off the need for metallic and plastic implants.
Elisseeff is an old hand at tech transfer, having received her first patent for tissue scaffolding while still a graduate student at MIT. “It’s actually kind of fun,” she says, “trying to create the strongest patent for your stuff without infringing on others.” But even more than traditional tech transfer, a start-up company like CARTILIX requires her to walk a fine line between academician and entrepreneur. “You definitely have to keep a balance,” she says. “I like to think I’m staking out the middle ground.”
The middle ground is the place where promising discoveries make the leap from the laboratory bench to clinic, a gap that scientists/entrepreneurs like Elisseeff are poised to fill, though not without some tension. Unlike Stanford, which has a long history of successful start-ups, Hopkins has tended not to encourage the formation of such companies by University faculty and is still grappling with issues like the value of entrepreneurship in tenure decisions. “My position on that is no,” says Elisseeff bluntly. “I want to be evaluated by the same criteria as my other academic colleagues,” which she defines as “trying to keep up strong academic standards, doing innovative science in the lab and having students do well.”
As for her successful management of these competing demands, it’s due in part, she says, to a strategy that limits her involvement with CARTILIX to scientific issues. “I’m not trying to do everything,” Elisseeff says. The day-to-day operations of the company are handled by Norman Marcus, an orthopedic surgeon who serves as the company’s chief scientific officer. Elisseeff herself spends only one day a week on company business; the rest of the time is devoted to her research. “I don’t want to do product development in the laboratory,” she says. “I’d rather develop new things and prove that they work—yet still have the excitement of translation through the company.”
Because CARTILIX is a biomaterials company, it’s also investigating new uses of the polymer scaffolding Elisseeff developed. Meanwhile, her Hopkins research in the department of biomedical engineering focuses on evaluating the advantages of using different kinds of stem cells for cartilage regeneration—from bone marrow as well as from embryonic stem cells.
“We’re learning how embryonic cells go down this pathway and how they talk to other cells in the knee tissue. We’re learning that stem cells don’t necessarily have to make tissue to bring about repair. They can secrete agents that help them repair surviving tissue,” she says. “That’s exciting.”
Marcus believes that Elisseeff’s example may inspire other Hopkins researchers to take on the challenges of launching a start-up. “There are probably 50 other companies waiting to be born here,” he says.
