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Biomatrica Goes After $34B Market For Preserving Lab Samples

When temperatures rise in the desert, leaving little solace but a slice of shade from a saguaro cactus, some animals take shelter in another place , a time lapse of sorts called anhydrobiosis.

It means “life without water,” and enables some small organisms’ survival for up to 120 years without growth, reproduction or movement.

San Diego-based Biomatrica Inc. has applied the principles of this phenomenon in a new technology called SampleMatrix that is being used to preserve lab samples without refrigeration.

The dry-storage technology can be used to save money and space for biotechnology or forensic applications or for military use to keep vaccines suitable during transport for soldiers in remote areas.

Testing Biomatrica’s technology now are several large pharmaceutical companies, academic laboratories, NASA, the U.S. Navy and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department crime lab.

Biomatrica founders Rolf Muller and Judy Muller-Cohn are husband and wife, business partners and molecular biologists who saw a gap in the $34 billion bio-stability market for sample storage.

Muller, the chief scientific officer, named some of the testing parties as GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, DuPont and some research labs at Harvard University and every University of California campus.


Helping The Bottom Line

That’s a heavy-duty list for a startup with 12 employees, including just three salespeople.

Muller-Cohn, the chief executive officer, said while it costs a lab about $1 per year to store a sample in a freezer, the dry storage her company has developed costs 35 cents per sample.

As a scientist at the former Mycogen, now part of Dow AgroSciences, Muller-Cohn once lost 1,000 samples as a result of an electrical lapse at her lab.

That can mean weeks or even months of lost work for scientists, she said.

Biomatrica has a patent pending for its technology, which is a synthetic polymer that stabilizes biological samples, such as DNA, viruses, proteins and cells, at room temperature. Materials are revived with a little water.

The life sciences community here seems to largely agree that Biomatrica’s technology is promising. In December, a panel of two dozen well respected, local high-tech and biotech executives named Biomatrica a winner at Connect’s Most Innovative Product Awards in the diagnostics and research tools category. Connect is a technology-transfer and networking trade group that fosters entrepreneurship and partnerships in life sciences and high-tech.

While SampleMatrix only stepped into the market in June, there are reservations to adopting the product widely, even among those who like it. Some say they have concerns about how well preserved the DNA sample, protein or other biological material would be after rehydrating it.


More Testing Sought

One of the Connect judges, David Chang, director of process development at Genentech Inc.’s Oceanside offices, said he was impressed with Biomatrica’s technology, but that he did not think Genentech would likely use it until further testing is done. Chang oversees the process by which proteins are made at Genentech for injectable medicines.

“If you don’t store samples carefully or ship them appropriately, they can be unsafe for human use,” Chang said. “Genentech is pretty conservative. We tend to not jump in right away.”

Chang said he thought SampleMatrix would be most suitable for diagnostic companies that would not be using lab samples for human consumption or injection. But he said that without more testing, it’s difficult to know if the sample storage method could affect the outcome of a diagnostic test. Chang added that the military, which would be less likely to be able to ship a large freezer to remote locations, could be a target market for the company until further tests are conclusive.

The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department crime lab has been testing SampleMatrix to store DNA samples for about a year, said Stephen Guroff, the department’s supervising criminalist. Guroff said samples he checked at various times during a six-month period were preserved “as well or better” using SampleMatrix when compared with freezer-stored samples. Guroff added that the samples used as part of the study were strictly for testing purposes, not evidence from actual crime scenes. He said he didn’t know how the technology would perform in “real life” samples.

“Samples derived from evidence may react differently, but if you’ve done your job right, you’ve cleaned up everything but the DNA,” Guroff said.

Still, he doesn’t think the Sheriff’s Department would adopt SampleMatrix instead of freezer storage “over the short term.”


A Potential Problem Solver

Muller-Cohn said other techniques for sample storage include freeze-drying, though she said it is laborious and expensive. Another method is the use of cellulose-based filter paper, but recovery of the complete sample is poor, Muller-Cohn said.

Biomatrica began selling its product in June.

“It’s going well,” Muller-Cohn said, noting only that revenues are under $1 million. “Everyone has sample problems. It’s a real paradigm shift because they’re not shipping their samples in huge Styrofoam freezers anymore.”

Muller and Muller-Cohn borrowed money from family and friends and used personal savings until they were able to garner attention from an angel investor a year ago.

Biomatrica, which they incorporated in 2004, has raised nearly $3 million, mostly from angel investors, said Muller-Cohn. She declined to disclose how much of that the company has spent.

“We were truly a garage company until September of 2005,” she said, referring to the month they moved into their first lab.

Muller, a former researcher at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, predicts profitability within two years. He said the company plans to grow its sales staff and hopes to attract more capital.

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