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TELEMEDICINE
Transforming Health-Tech–Startup Challenges

into Opportunities

By Anne-Françoise Pelé
L aunching a health-tech startup is not a sine- nology, it would be “a game-changer,” and Narasimha

“should start a company.”
cure. It takes time, money, and dedication to
get the business up to speed.
Weissman has a long and respected track record
At the recent MEMS World Summit
Webinar, Anil Narasimha, co-founder and CEO of in stem cell biology. He is the director of the
Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and
biotech startup Mekonos, and Anil Achyuta, an invest- Regenerative Medicine. Weissman is also Virginia
ment director and founding member of TDK Ventures, and D.K. Ludwig Professor for Clinical Investigation
explained the beautiful and beastly aspects of starting in Cancer Research and a professor of developmental
a MEMS-based health-tech business, describing the biology at Stanford University School of Medicine,
experience from their respective perspectives as and he has founded several companies focusing on
entrepreneur and investor. stem cell therapies.
“If someone like Irving says something like that,
THE ENTREPRENEUR you’ve got to take it seriously,” said Narasimha. He
The delivery of molecules into fragile cell types Anil Narasimha, co-founder promptly dropped his postdoc ambitions in order to
remains complex, especially for applications such as and CEO of biotech startup demonstrate the feasibility of the technology and
cell and gene therapy. Challenges include a lack of Mekonos launch Mekonos.
precision and automation that makes these therapies
overly expensive to develop. Silicon Valley–based Defining the business model
startup Mekonos has developed a platform leveraging When asked about the hardest decision he’s had to
microelectromechanical system technology to add a make during his entrepreneurial journey at Mekonos,
layer of automation and precision to the drug devel- Narasimha acknowledged that developing the tech-
opment pipeline. nology has been a challenge but said developing the
As part of the ideation process, Narasimha said, business model has been even more challenging.
the Mekonos team pondered how it could “utilize Mekonos has designed a system-on-chip that
MEMS technology as an integral component to a combines three elements. The first element is a
platform to automate ex vivo delivery of molecules or proprietary microfluidic chip that traps single cells
payloads into cells, especially fragile cell types that into specific nodes. The second is a nano-engineered
are inherently hard to manipulate.” Using actuated silicon MEMS. Controllable nanoneedles directly
nanoneedles, the startup is able to inject single cells address the trapped single cells, and each nanoneedle
with a specific payload with high efficiency and cell delivers the payload inside the cell. The third element
viability, he said. “Applications are numerous, but is surface chemistry to provide a more robust and
our focus has been in the cell- and gene-therapy Anil Achyuta, an investment versatile solution.
personalized-medicine space. Our vision is to make director and founding member “Because we went the solid needle route, we had to
personalized medicine more accessible to the main- of TDK Ventures develop the surface chemistry to basically facilitate
stream population.” attraction of a payload onto the needle and the
Narasimha founded Mekonos in 2017 after completing his Ph.D. at release of the payload once the needle is inside the cell,” Narasimha
the University of California–San Diego and moving to Stanford Uni- said. “The crux of our platform is the combination of these three
versity to become a postdoctoral fellow in Michael Snyder’s laboratory. elements working in synchronicity to deliver any kind of payload into
In his talk, he shared some of the challenges he has faced during his any kind of cell type.”
entrepreneurial journey. There are very few MEMS companies in the cell- and gene-therapy
space today, and Mekonos claims it is the only one to offer a solution
Finding the right associate and adviser for controlled and individualized molecular delivery in cells. “Being in
As a biologist, Narasimha had envisioned the target application, but it that unique situation, we have to be really careful with our business
was not his idea to use nanoneedles. “Luckily, my co-founder [Steven model,” said Narasimha. “We are introducing a new technology, so if we
Banerjee] is a mechanical engineer who was working on nanoneedles,” come up with a new business model, that’s going to scare off not only
he said. At Stanford, “we had this idea of using nanoneedles for a bio- potential customers but investors as well.”
logical application and thought, why not for delivery?” Narasimha said Mekonos is still working on the definition of its
Prior to co-founding Mekonos, Banerjee had worked on the IBM business model. “We have the strategy of being an enabling company
Millipede project, which used an array of thousands of miniaturized for biotech pharma companies and demonstrating our value in multiple
atomic-force microscopes as a memory device. He is now the founder applications within those drug development pipelines,” he said, but
and CEO of NExTNet, a startup building an AI-powered, graph-based “how do we maximize our value?”
big-data analytic infrastructure to accelerate the discovery and devel-
opment of biomedicine. Hiring experts
Narasimha said he was also fortunate to have had the support of Mekonos brings together a team of experts from Stanford, Berkeley,
Stanford’s Irving Weissman, who told him that if he could deliver DNA, MIT, and Purdue. Still, Narasimha said he finds it complex to hire the
RNA, and CRISPR molecules or payloads in a stem cell using this tech- right technical expertise, especially people who are passionate about

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