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By ZAGENO – Jun 3, 2021 – 11 minutes read
This podcast interview was originally published by Editors at Zageno. Captivate Bio’s co-founder and managing partner Lori Oakes discusses what it takes as a new and emerging supplier to succeed. Below is an edited version of the interview transcribed.
Zageno: I’d like to begin by understanding more about your journey from a biology student to co-founding a startup amid a pandemic.
Lori: As a biology student, my career path was earmarked for either graduate school or medical school, and at the time I started working in a natural chemistry lab in Worcester, MA. The company was working on isolating an extract from the coleus tree and our scientists had found that this naturally occurring agent would boost the immune response to vaccines.
I had the opportunity to work with different departments in the company, including production, helping them transition the isolation process of the extract, quality control, establishing the SLPs purchasing, and even sales and marketing. I realized that I really wanted to get more involved on the business side. So I took a position with their sales and marketing team.
From there, I went on to work for a distribution company that was importing cosmetic ingredients, food chemicals, and biochemical reagents from all over the world and selling them to companies like Revlon, Kraft, and Sigma. We added diagnostic testing products for special hematology inside of genetic labs. I moved into roles within commercial operations, business development, shipping, and logistics, not only nationally, but globally. With the success we saw in distribution, we launched a subsidiary model where we helped ex-US manufacturers establish their own focused company within the US.
With my experience across different disciplines, my path led me to the stem cell culture universe, where I was asked to help establish a US entity for an international cell culture company. For years, we were distributing their cytogenetic kits, stem cell media, and molecular diagnostic kits and now we would work to help them establish a JV-backed entity here in the US. As General Manager for that company, we built a strong presence in the cell therapy research market and this is where I worked with Tanya Potcova, co-founder and CEO of Captivate Bio. In late 2019, our company sold just as the pandemic hit.
As we worked through the merger, we knew we had built great relationships with our customers and established deep supplier relationships. With the goal to make sure that our customers would be able to continue their work without product disruption due to the merger – Captivate Bio was born.
At the core of Captivate Bio are our people and our customers.
It sounds like you were just as curious about business as you were as a biology student. And I think that’s a common denominator in sciences, an insatiable curiosity.
Yeah, I’ve always loved science and what do you do with science if you’re not going to medical school or graduate school? So, it’s been so wonderful to enjoy the science from the business side of things.
I read in your company description that you pride yourself as a woman-led scientific provider. Can you explain what that means to you, what it means to your partners, and to your customers?
Who doesn’t want to be Wonder Woman? At the core of her world are people and we have that same philosophy. Here at the core of Captivate Bio are our people and our customers. We believe researchers are also heroes of our world. They’re working to develop therapies, designing testing solutions, and honestly, just trying to make the world a better place.
And let’s face it, our suppliers, they’re also our heroes. They’re delivering innovative products and services with high quality and hopefully in a timely manner. And again, just as we know our customers and our partners, we wanted everyone to know who we are and who is behind the Captivate Bio team.
Now you’ve had a very busy 2021 so far. In January, you launched a portfolio of cell culture tools to address COVID and other diseases as well as to reduce supply chain delays in cell culture media manufacturing, and I’d love to learn more about this particular announcement.
Absolutely. At our old company, we were used to shipping cell culture media all over the world while primarily importing the material here in the U.S. When the pandemic hit and the demand for the critical media formulations in transport media increased, we pivoted and pulled our network together to help address the supply issues the US was seeing with testing kits.
Specifically with the sourcing and manufacturing of the transport media or various ingredients needed to make the COVID collection kits. And so while the big manufacturers were busy ramping up. We were able to help by supplementing many of the smaller labs with bulk media manufacturing and critical reagents. We launched Captivate Bio quickly with the idea of filling the gaps in US manufacturing. We wanted to really address procurement challenges, any project planning and movement of product when the bigger companies were unable to deliver. Providing customers with another reliable option for procuring the materials they needed.
What we can expect from Captivate for the remainder of this year and into 2022.
It’s not a shortlist, that’s for sure. First and foremost, our customers can expect unparalleled customer service with transparency and speedy communication all of the time. I really feel that just needs to be said.
Strategically, we’ve got a very busy year coming up. We’ve just recently signed distribution agreements with a few international suppliers. We’ll be announcing them later this month. These relationships will allow us to support the cytogenetic community. With cell culture, media, and reagents for their clinical analysis.
Researchers are first for us. Their success is our success.
In addition, we’re going to be expanding our platelet lysate portfolio for our cell therapy customers. If you’ve noticed, we’ve also just launched a new portfolio of small molecules for natural killer cells. We also offer bulk manufacturing, key classical media formulations for stem cell research like DMEM, MCDB 131, and RPMI, as well as others.
Hopefully, once we get through all that, towards the second half of the year, we’re really looking to test the market with a new bioprocessing cell culture media that will be applicable for human pluripotent and mesenchymal stem cells. That’s currently in development.
Lori, let me say, it’s been wonderful to learn about Captivate Bio, to learn about your personal journey and the very brave decision to start-up amidst this once-in-a-century pandemic – let’s hope it’s a once in a century pandemic!
It’s really an incredible story.
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