OEN Member NewsA Pivot Leads to Groundbreaking Deep Tech in Fat Tissue Physiology
Dr. Frank Lau is no stranger to the art of the pivot.
Early in his professional life, Dr. Lau traded credit derivatives for a bulge bracket investment bank, helping grow their assets under management by billions of dollars. And yet, even with that significant success under his belt, Dr. Lau chose to pivot his career path and go to medical school. This road led him to Harvard’s plastic surgery residency and a two-year research fellowship in fat physiology, aiming to achieve a goal that scientists in the field had been trying to reach since the 1960s: keeping human fat tissue alive outside the body, or “ex vivo”.
“Fat is important in many health and research scenarios, but it’s one of the tissues we have the least accurate models for,” Dr. Lau said.
While that initial project didn’t achieve its goal, Dr. Lau then became a faculty member at Louisiana State University where he built a tissue engineering lab. After two more years of work, the team made a breakthrough and kept human fat tissue alive for at least eight weeks outside the body.
The solution was a callback to Dr. Lau’s history, and was classic for deep tech, combining insights from three disparate fields: stem cell science, tissue engineering and plastic surgery.
Dr. Lau and team quickly patented the technology and began deeply exploring the role of fat tissue in disease. “We initially focused on weight loss drug development, but there wasn’t much funding for obesity drugs at the time,” Dr. Lau explained. And so, he pivoted again.
The team moved into cancer model research, specifically breast and colon cancer. Obesity is correlated to worse outcomes in cancer patients, and Dr. Lau leveraged the technology to both study the impact of fat tissue on cancer and begin developing a way to keep human tumors alive ex vivo. “I’m very proud of the groundbreaking work we’ve done in this space,” Dr. Lau said. With proof of concept in hand, Dr. Lau and team were ready to officially launch a company around their tech and research.
And then, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived and forced another pivot.
COVID and its effects delayed the official launch of the new company, Keliomics, until 2022. By then, Dr. Lau had relocated from Louisiana to Oregon, a move he says was a major benefit to the new startup. Keliomics participated in startup competitions, was an Oregon Tech Awards finalist, and received support from the Innovation Gap Fund. This funding helped Keliomics make another pivot: to seed-stage pharmaceutical development company.
“In addition to our cancer tissue studies, we’ve circled back to our initial project of weight loss drugs, this time as a co-developer,” Dr. Lau said. There are now multiple weight loss drugs on the market, but Keliomics has an ace up their sleeve that other companies don’t. With their patented technology, the team can see the actual effects any drugs they develop have on fat tissue, in real time. Historically, drug development relies on seeing overall body composition change, but Keliomics is able to test ex vivo subcutaneous and visceral fat tissue. The team hopes that beyond the seed stage, Keliomics will have a sizeable impact on human metabolic health and bring new drugs to market.
Keliomics is Dr. Lau’s fourth startup, and he pointed to knowing when to pivot and grit as key attributes for entrepreneurs. “You’ll constantly experience emotional whiplash as a startup founder,” he shared. “Being emotionally vulnerable when appropriate, developing communication skills and trusting yourself to do the work are key.”
Produced by A.wordsmith for OEN
