Business and Science a Good Mix for Brune

Science is in her blood, so it’s not really surprising that Ellen Brune earned her doctorate in chemical engineering, invented a patent-worthy technology and founded her own pharmaceutical company by the time she was 27 years old.

The St. Louis native and graduate of the University of Arkansas is the chief scientific officer at Boston Mountain Biotech LLC, formed in 2011, and as the company’s momentum grows, Brune finds herself right where she wants to be — shaking hands, making connections and speaking on behalf of her creation.

“I like interacting with people and being out there working with people,” she said. “At heart, I’m not a lab rat. I can do it, but it’s not my favorite.”

Brune, of course, needs every ounce of her charm and intellect. In the world of entrepreneurship, there are plenty of naysayers and few guarantees.

“There are other scientists who think I’m out of my mind,” Brune said. “I’ve been told this will never work. You have to keep moving forward.”

Using genetic optimization, Brune created a series of production-ready E. coli cell strains with minimal amounts of contaminant proteins. Brune’s technology, called Lotus, makes it easier to find the target protein, whatever it may be, and separate it from background contamination, thus saving time and money in the process of making a pharmaceutical.

To explain what she does, Brune offered this analogy: “Put the tree, the oranges and the leaves into a blender and try to get juice out of the other end. I convince a tree to have no bark and no leaves and to only make oranges. How much easier would it be to make orange juice?”

 

Problem Solver

Brune, who earned her PhD in chemical engineering in May, comes from a long line of engineers. Her father is an electrical engineer, her uncle is a mechanical engineer, her aunt is a petroleum engineer and one of her great-grandfathers was an engineer. Her mother, who ultimately decided to earn a degree in mathematics, began college as a petroleum engineer.

“They said there was an open position in the family for chemical or computer engineering, and I chose chemical,” she said with a laugh. “When you’re raised in a family of engineers, you’re just wired that way.”

She also jokes that her childhood passion for dance didn’t quite translate into a solid career as an adult.

“I was never really a good enough tap dancer to be the Rockette I wanted to be,” she said, referring to the famous dance troupe known for its glitzy costumes and precision high kicks.

While Brune’s ascendance in science was essentially inevitable, entrepreneurship wasn’t. Brune had to step out of the familiar confines of the lab and look at her work from the standpoint of a business person, not a scientist. Brune was thorough in her approach.

She earned a certificate in entrepreneurship through the Sam M. Walton College of Business, read the revered The Startup Owner’s Manual by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf, and competed in several startup contests, including the Donald W. Reynolds Governor’s Cup business plan competion, where Boston Mountain took first place in 2012.

The company also won $50,000 in marketing and operational funding through the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program.

Boston Mountain, based in Fayetteville, is also one of more than 90 companies affiliated with Innovate Arkansas, a program of the Arkansas Economic Development Commission and Winrock International that supports tech startups with mentoring and financing. 

Part of Brune’s plunge into the world of business entailed the grueling process of making 124 phone calls, many of them cold, to scientists and CEOs to explain Lotus and ask them their thoughts on the technology.

The goal was to learn how to describe Lotus to people who had no background in science, and, more specifically, those who control the purse strings at research labs.

“Cool and neat is cool and neat but it’s not something people would necessarily pay for,” she said. “How much does it cost and how much will it save?”

Brune recently took her pitch skills to the big stage in Palm Springs, Calif., where she was a presenter at an annual conference hosted by the Cambridge Healthtech Institute.

Her target market is protein pharmaceutical manufacturers, the makers of IV and injection drugs used in the treatment of serious ailments such as diabetes, arthritis and cancer.

Brune estimates that the Lotus technology can carve out as much as 20 percent in the production cycle, which equates to big numbers in an industry that spends an estimated $8 billion a year filtering background contaminants.

“This problem came from the industry,” she said. “The industry called us and said, ‘This is a problem, can you fix it?’ We’re not trying to invent the problem to fit the solution.”

 

Capitalized Science

The concept for something like Lotus was more than a decade in the making and was spearheaded in part by UA chemical engineering professor Bob Beitle. But the actual brass tacks of the technology were only developed in the last three years.

When it came time for Boston Mountain to go public with the product and raise funds, the response was good. The initial bond issue — offered in $10,000 blocks at a five-year maturity — raised just more than $400,000. The financing was essential for patent litigation with the World Intellectual Property Organization, equipment and supplies, salaries and continued research and development.

“It was exciting to actually have the money to start going forward,” Brune said.

Boston Mountain’s CEO, Ricky Draehn, is Brune’s father, and McKinzie Fruchtl, the company’s fermentation specialist, is a colleague who came up through the UA engineering program alongside Brune. Other employees work at Boston Mountain in exchange for an equity stake in the business.

Even if the Lotus technology is sound and backed by more than a decade of research, there is still plenty of resistance in the industry.

“We have competition in the fact that companies have a system that works and they are slow to change,” Brune said.

For a manufacturer to adopt Lotus for a pre-existing drug requires approval from the Food and Drug Administration, a long and tedious process. The trick, Brune said, is to find new drugs that have not yet gone into production and convince companies to use Lotus in the manufacturing process prior to registration with the FDA.

Boston Mountain would generate revenue through licensing and royalty agreements with manufacturers, even if Lotus is only used in a pilot program and even if a drug made with Lotus fails to perform in the marketplace.

As the chief scientific officer of a promising biotech company that has received inquiries from the renowned Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., Brune has met a lot of people, and on many occasions she’s been offered a job if Boston Mountain doesn’t pan out. But for now, and if Brune has her way, perhaps even forever, those job offers aren’t a priority.

“It’s not that I don’t have options,” she said. “But I do this because I love what I do.”