Ireland’s Brightest Startups Tackle Healthcare’s Biggest Problems

Sitting 2,000 miles north of the tropics, Ireland isn’t the first country that springs to mind upon mention of the Zika virus. But thanks to a thriving biotech cluster, an Irish company was the first in the world to produce proteins needed to diagnose this disease linked to severe birth defects. More than 260 companies have relied on Aalto Bio Reagents’ technology to develop tests for Zika in the past year and a half, while others turn to the Dublin-headquartered business for products that help detect HIV, cancers, and other illnesses.
 
Aalto Bio is not alone. In fact, six of the seven largest international diagnostic companies are located in Ireland, which has made substantial investments in both research and manufacturing. If a patient receives a stent to prop open a blood vessel, for example, there’s an eight-in-10 chance it was made on the Emerald Isle, which also produces six of the world’s 10 top-selling drugs and is Europe’s largest destination for international pharmaceutical investment. Biotech also stands out for its prominence among the country’s research community. A recent BioSpace news article states that the life sciences industry, including pharma, biotech, and medical technology manufacturing, is no small player in Ireland, and accounts for about 21 percent of the country’s economy. As a result, medical innovations from Irish companies are gaining more traction in markets across the Atlantic.
 
Breathing Easy
Delivering aerosolized medication to a patient’s lungs is harder than it sounds. In fact, older nebulizers can waste as much as half of a prescribed drug during use. Seeing an opportunity to do better, an Irish engineer developed a vibrating palladium mesh that helps administer medication at dosages nine times higher than older methods. Over the following two decades, the technology by Aerogen has been used by 4 million people in 75 countries.
 
“This is about getting your patients better, faster. Avoiding time in the intensive care unit. Avoiding admissions to the emergency room. So, we’re really changing that paradigm of how respiratory patients are being dealt with in American hospitals,” said Eileen Sweeney, the company’s marketing manager in the Americas.
 
Through stand-alone products and technology integrated with ventilators made by GE, Covidien, Philips, and other manufacturers, Aerogen has built a presence in more than 1,700 U.S. hospitals. About half of the company’s business is in the U.S., and its revenue has expanded by 30 percent-plus every year since 2008. That rapid pace of growth was probably hard to foresee in 1997, but the company had help discovering the market potential of its technology during its startup phase with feasibility funding from Enterprise Ireland. The country’s expansive business development agency has offered additional guidance ever since, lending knowledge from its regional offices in roughly 30 countries as Aerogen expanded abroad. The same is true for Aalto Bio, which has taken part in an Enterprise Ireland international marketing initiative over the past two years.
 
Digital DNA
The Irish push into American markets for biotech isn’t limited to established companies. Among the 200,000 people employed at businesses working with Enterprise Ireland are entrepreneurs leveraging €32 million in startup funding awarded last year and other assistance. Within biotech, one of the most intriguing is Helixworks, which developed a novel way to store digital information on strands of synthetic DNA.
 
This data format can archive information almost indefinitely (as evidenced in the remains of long-extinct species). It’s also very dense. Fifty petabytes—the amount of information believed to equal every written work in human history—could be recorded on a surface smaller than a stamp. Memory on this scale will become necessary sooner rather than later. A forecast by Research and Markets anticipates the voracious market for data storage in the cloud will expand at a 28 percent compound annual growth rate. That demand is driven by a digital world that creates, by some estimates, 2,500 petabytes of new information every day. Analysis of that “big data” is already discovering efficiencies in supply chains, manufacturing, advertising, healthcare, and other fields, while making emerging technologies like self-driving cars a reality.
 
The founders of Helixworks began looking for ways to drive down the currently prohibitive cost of synthetic DNA storage in 2013 while earning their graduate degrees and formed their business with the help of Enterprise Ireland’s New Frontiers program. This year, they not only landed a coveted slot to pitch their startup at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, they also took home an award for presenting the most innovative idea.
 
“Enterprise Ireland has a very strong association with SXSW and has brought delegations of client companies here for the past six years,” said the development organization’s U.S. senior vice president, Paul Burfield. “By giving these Irish companies the opportunity to exhibit at SXSW, Enterprise Ireland is helping them to better understand the potential for their product or service in the U.S. market.”
 
What’s Next?
Helixworks will likely be back at SXSW next year—free passes came with its “most innovative” award—and the company has made its technology for encoding synthetic DNA data open-source.
 
Advancements over the next 12 months should be brisk among other Irish biotech companies, as well. In the global market for in vitro diagnostics that Deloitte estimates [PDF] is growing by 5 percent annually, Aalto Bio plans to increase its U.S. footprint and will have a presence at the American Association for Clinical Chemistry conference this summer. In January, it announced availability of new antibodies for the testing and research of yellow fever.
 
Aerogen, meanwhile, is setting up an office in Dubai to better serve clinical markets in the region. Like the balmy climes where Aalto is making an impact on Zika, the Mideast might seem an unlikely place to encounter an Irish business. But that might not be the case for long. Enterprise Ireland aims to spend €1.25 billion annually on R&D while increasing annual exports by €5 billion across all industries in the coming years. Ireland’s innovative biotech cluster, in particular, will be a sector to watch as its reach expands further into the U.S. and beyond.