The Food Scientist Who Founded a Biotech Company with Laura Katz, Founder and CEO of Helaina
About this episode
Laura Katz discusses her journey in founding Helaina and the challenges of bringing bioidentical human proteins to market.
What does it actually take to bring a human protein—one never before put into a human body orally—from a shared co-working lab to a partnership with the largest food company in the world? This week, Adam sits down with Laura Katz, founder and CEO of Helaina, the company making bioidentical human bioactive proteins, starting with its first commercialized product: a replica human lactoferrin sold under the trademark EFERA. Laura shares the whole journey. A self-described food scientist who knew at age ten that her purpose was to feed people, she cold-emailed her way into biotech with no network, no fancy school, and no idea what a venture capitalist was—collecting "hundreds of no's" along the way. From launching a lab in New York the same month COVID hit, to running over a hundred fermentation tanks at commercial scale, to publishing eleven peer-reviewed papers and running six clinical trials at once, she explains how Helena knocked through each milestone in step with its funding rounds. We get into the science of why lactoferrin is so hard to make (an 80-kilodalton molecule packed with disulfide bridges and glycosylation), why the biotech "market adjustment" is pushing the…
People in this episode
Host: Adam Yee
Guest: Laura Katz
Topics covered
- biotech
- food science
- human proteins
- entrepreneurship
- nutrition
- clinical trials
Keywords
- biotech
- lactoferrin
- human proteins
- entrepreneurship
- clinical trials
- nutrition
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Helaina
Products: EFERA
Places: New York
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