11.18.19
Entrepreneurial wisdom from the founders of in vivo imaging tech company SonoVol
By Shellie Edge; Photography by Sarah Daniels, Innovate Carolina
UNC-affiliated startup company SonoVol is pushing in vivo imaging to the edge. The company’s easy-to-use scanning technology allows scientists who are developing drugs and therapies with the potential to cure diseases to spend more time on their science and less time operating imaging equipment. In short, the company’s work means getting better drugs to market, faster – with less expense.
To learn more about SonoVol’s entrepreneurial journey, keys to success and industry-changing technology, Innovate Carolina caught up with Ryan Gessner, a former UNC-Chapel Hill student and co-founder and CEO of the company; and Paul Dayton, professor and interim chair of the UNC-NCSU Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering, who is a co-founder of SonoVol and head of the company’s scientific advisory board.
SonoVol is a life science research tools company. Our goal is to make easy-to-use instruments that enable disease researchers and drug developers to have a non-invasive window into the body to better understand incredibly complex biological systems. We operate within the niche market of in vivo imaging technology. A handful of companies make in vivo imaging tools, and they exist on pretty much every major university campus across the world as well as at pharmaceutical companies and government labs. However, usage of these instruments is often low. You can find an imaging center on many campuses with several million dollars’ worth of in vivo equipment in it, and many of the systems in there are collecting dust. These are cutting edge tools that allow researchers to better study disease, but they are more often than not extremely underutilized.
We’ve done a bunch of research over the years and talked to hundreds of people to try to answer this because we don’t want our products suffering the same lack of usage. We want people to love them and use them all the time to help study disease and develop the drugs of tomorrow. The general consensus is that people get really excited by the capabilities of these tools, but then find out they often have complex workflows, require extensive specialized training, and/or are very expensive both in terms of user time as well as financially to operate. We have spent years building an instrument that’s easy to use and can be made cost effective.
The name is a combination of “Sono” (ultrasound) and “Vol” (volumetric, 3D). The name arises from our technology originally being based on 3D ultrasound, though we have since expanded into additional imaging modalities through funding from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.
The Vega emerged as the solution to a particular set of problems we faced while trying to support cancer researchers with our imaging methods years ago while Ryan was in graduate school. If the Vega had existed then, I think I would have been able to publish twice as many papers with our collaborators in the Lineberger Cancer Center. As an example, one of the problems I faced was the time required to perform imaging scans; I used to be able to do about 8 to 12 scans on a very busy day. Today, one of our Vega customers does about 50 scans in two hours. So back when I was a graduate student, it was that identification of the throughput bottleneck that made us realize that there had to be a better way. Another indication that the market wanted this technology was people asking us at conferences where they could purchase a system that would allow them to capture microvascular images like ours; the answer was they couldn’t. So we built a system to bring this UNC technology to the market.
We worked with Don Rose and Andrew Kant at Carolina Kickstart who helped us set up all the infrastructure to actually become a company, name it, set up a license for the technology from UNC and put together an advisory board. It was really helpful to have their team guide us through those processes since it’s uncharted territory for people in the academic world (unless you’ve started a company before) and there’s so much to try to think about when commercializing technology. It’s nice to not have to go find a tax accountant, and a graphic design firm for a logo, and an attorney, etc. They basically took a big load off of our shoulders when it came to navigating the initial red tape that’s involved once a business takes off, at all levels (institutional, state, federal, etc.). They provided support in getting initial funding, for instance, by reviewing our federal grants before submission to improve likelihood of success. They also helped us secure space in the Genome Science building (GSB) and work through UNC’s Facilities Use Agreement process.
As an aside, it was a shame when Carolina Kickstart lost incubator space in GSB. Having physical space on campus to start a company is incredibly important, and making that process as painless as possible is a great way for a university to encourage startups to happen and accelerate their growth. It demonstrates a tangible commitment by the University that it is making a concerted effort to foster a startup culture. I was excited to hear rumblings that the Kickstart Accelerator will once again be finding a home on UNC’s campus.
If the Vega had existed then, I think I would have been able to publish twice as many papers with our collaborators in the Lineberger Cancer Center.
In general, I think UNC is ahead of the curve when compared to other institutions across the country, based on what we’ve heard of other company founders over the years. That said, there are always opportunities for improvement no matter where you are. Things as simple as making the university an inviting place for startups by enabling UNC-affiliated startup employees to purchase parking passes on campus would go a long way.
I also think there are opportunities for improvement in the way the technology transfer office handles the renegotiation process for patent licenses. The Carolina Express license was a great way to get up and running with extremely low overhead, but we found the renegotiation process with the university to be quite challenging. Approaching the negotiation more as partners would have made life easier for us and would have also helped accelerate commercialization of the resulting product (which is a win-win).
Absolutely. We have secured many different grants from both the NIH and NSF with collaborations in industry and academia. At first, we would limit our collaborations with people at UNC, but over time, our network has grown and we now have collaborations with universities across the country: UC San Diego, Johns Hopkins, University of Minnesota, and Duke. We have also discovered an entire new application market for our technology in regenerative medicine, which we’ve received over $2 million in grant funding to pursue, which we wouldn’t have found if not for conversations with people at trade shows.
Our objective as a company is to make life easier for people who are developing drugs and therapies to cure diseases. So, to the extent that our easy-to-use equipment frees up mental bandwidth and time for scientists in disease research labs or pharmaceutical companies to focus on what’s driving disease and how to stop it, we will have succeeded. More than just making life better for our users, our technology also has the capacity to help researchers figure out whether or not the drug they are studying will actually work when it enters clinical trials. This will help get better drugs to market sooner, with less expense.
A big part of this for us has been stubbornness – to not quit when our initial grant application got rejected again and again. Eventually, we succeeded with that first pilot funded study from the NSF, and about ten other grants followed. But the willingness to keep going even though your initial attempts fail has been our key to success.
I think most faculty members and grad students are more entrepreneurial than they give themselves credit for. They work tirelessly to push the ball forward for their niche in the scientific community. In a way, that’s a big part of forming and growing a startup company. You identify a pain or problem in the market, and work tirelessly to figure out a way of solving it. And there’s no playbook for it, you’ve got to figure it out as you go. Which is the same as any research project in a lab. And just like any professor running a lab – your money is always running out and it’s a race against the financial hourglass to land your next customer, paper or grant, or to determine what you’re working on is doomed to fail and you pivot before the money runs out.
I think what surprised us the most about starting SonoVol was how many assumptions we had that were just flat out wrong. Our product today looks nothing like what we thought it would look like when we started. There’s a tendency for startup founders to not want to show their hand and be really secretive with their new idea. The idea is generally that you’ll lurk under the radar, spend lots of time and money developing a product in secret, then launch it with great success – But that’s not how the real world works, and this type of thinking can be counterproductive. We’ve learned the most whenever we’ve gotten out of our offices and had conversations with potential customers in our market. And we’ve learned to not spend that time talking about why our technology is great, but instead listening to potential customers and figuring out what pains they have that our technology might solve. We learned all this stuff in the I-Corps training program through the NIH, which we highly recommend. Also, there are internal resources as well, such as the Startup-UNC course (formerly Launching the Venture) at the business school and Kickstart’s University Entrepreneurship Workshop.
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