Moving to Commercialization: Getting the technology out of the labs
RAIG SHIMASAKI, PHD, MBA, is cofounder and CEO of Oklahoma City’s Moleculera labs, a neuroimmunology precision medicine company focused on diagnosing neuropsychiatric and behavioral disorders triggered by autoimmune response. Dr. Shimasaki is a serial entrepreneur, and scientist and is responsible for co-founding nine companies. He was involved in raising over $30 million for these companies and participated in taking five companies public in the U.S. and Canadian stock markets. His research and development work includes searching for an HIV vaccine, genetic breast cancer risk prediction, a rapid flu test, and therapeutic and biologic products for infectious diseases and neuropsychiatric disorders. He has led multiple products through the FDA approval process and is a co-inventor on several patents. 24
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BIO Edition 2022
He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Oklahoma Price School of Business and has written several books on biotech entrepreneurship. He is an expert at taking products to commercialization in an industry that sometimes struggles to get technology out of the labs. “You need to be able to recognize the challenges of science, but you can have the greatest discovery in the world and if you don’t really know how to actually take that into a process for a business and get it through regulatory approval and development it doesn’t really do a lot of good for a lot of people,” said Dr. Shimasaki. It was the desire to help people, especially children, that led Dr. Shimasaki to co-found Moleculera Labs with Dr. Madeleine Cunningham in 2011. They did this in response to receiving numerous calls from parents needing testing and treatment for their children following the end of a clinical study performed at the University of Oklahoma in conjunction with the National Institute of Mental Health. The study looked at antibodies in children that were triggering neuropsychiatric and behavioral disorders. They found that treating the specific antibodies made the patients well. Now, Moleculera has clinical labs where they focus on testing and treating for autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders through precision medicine, which refers to actually testing patients before you give them treatments, so they are directed to the correct treatment instead of trial and error or general treatments. This allows them to focus on the root of the issue rather than treating symptoms.
