IP is extremely important.
It's literally your foundation - the concrete of your company.
I'm Cynthia Hunefeld, I'm the founder and CEO of Evithé Biotechnology.
Our tagline is, ‘Let's put nature back into medicine’.
We develop botanical drugs, which are prescription drugs for a practitioner to prescribe.
And these include medicine with label claims.
These are evidence-based plant medicines.
We have a patent pending and we're working on the trade marks at the moment.
The word Evithé comes from Hebrew for Evia which means the living one.
This has been a really long journey.
I mean, the story started about 30 years ago, when my father became ill with an infection
which quickly developed into sepsis.
And that left him permanently disabled.
So, he went from being a firefighter to being wheelchair bound for a very long time.
I dedicated my studies, my life and a little bit of my sanity to finding a solution.
I was 10 when my father got ill and that makes a huge impact on a child growing up.
It set me on a road to learn more about traditional European plant medicine - my own heritage.
I'm from the Netherlands and there's a long tradition of the use of plant medicines there.
Initially, I decided I wanted to become a doctor, but quickly realised that being able
to make a real difference is really in the medicine development.
So, I decided to go back to the roots literally, and study plant medicines - initially in the
Netherlands, and later in New Zealand.
Going back to my first two years of studying botany and plant medicine, my father became
ill again.
And this time, I had a little bit of an idea of how plants protect themselves and the things
that are traditionally used to help someone fight infection and improve treatment outcomes.
I went to his doctor to ask if we could add a plant extract to his treatment and he said,
“Look, you know, if your dad's okay with that, just go ahead.”
So, I gave him a plant extract I had been looking into and researching and reviewing
and within a week, we had really seen the results and he was allowed to go home.
So, that was one of those defining moments,
when I spoke to the doctor he said, “Well, I usually don't really believe in that natural
stuff but I have seen the results before and after that really made a difference.
And you know, if you can find out what's responsible for this, then you might be able to help a
lot of people.”
Evithé Biotechnology has developed a product towards the treatment of auto inflammation
disease.
And we're starting off with the treatment of interstitial cystitis bladder pain, which
has a whole range of biomarkers that are similar to that in sepsis.
So, the cool thing with botanical drugs compared to pharmaceutical drugs is where you get a
pharmaceutical that has a single active molecule, one pathway and one receptor site, botanical
drugs learn from evolution.
Now, we have several active molecules that can address several receptor sites for the
treatment of more complex diseases hence it is a really expansive toolbox.
Currently, pharmaceutical drugs are trying to fix the car with just a wrench and we're
putting some more tools in the toolbox.
We have investigated 1% of the Amazon rainforest.
And this has given us 25% of the pharmaceutical drugs that are prescribed today.
What about the other 99%?
What if these don't fit the mould of single molecule drug development?
I think that's extremely important by looking at the value you're bringing to biodiversity as well.
I joined Victoria University and studied a postgraduate diploma in clinical research
and it really helped me get a better understanding of how plants have evolved to protect themselves
against disease and find a way of harnessing this into a botanical drug.
My next step from there was to connect tradition and science, my postgrad and clinical research.
This really gave me the opportunity to look at the plant extract that I supported my dad
with.
One of the things that really stood out is that there wasn't one single active constituent
responsible - it seemed that there are several active constituents working together.
In general, a plant never produces one constituent - it would die within a week if we just have
one molecule to defend itself with so I got really interested in how that could work in
a form of medicine development.
From there, I found that to really take the drug development to the next stage, I need to find
a way to connect, not just tradition, but also science and business together.
I started looking at IP quite early.
I think working in drug development and studying in that space made me aware of the importance
of IP at a very early stage.
I was allowed to sit in with the masters in drug discovery and development in Victoria
University Wellington.
One of the main lectures was IP and the importance of IP in drug development.
That was really eye opening and a little bit concerning, to be honest, it really showed
that the majority of drug development is really focused on identifying a completely novel
single molecule, which really narrows that medicine's toolbox
I decided to start studying towards a masters in innovation and commercialisation at Victoria
University Business School, with my newborn son - that was four years ago, Quin just turned
four.
I ran a lot of surveys, which identified that 70% of end consumers would actually prefer
a botanical drug over a chemical, which was really enlightening to find out.
There is such a massive market pool - over 78% of the practitioners felt confident in
prescribing.
I interviewed people in hospitals and they said, “Look, you know, if you can show me
one clinical trial - there is such a need for an expansion of the medicines’ toolbox.”
This was really insightful.
And on top of that, I actually presented a project to the Momentum Advisory Board, which
is an advisory board of both university students from different universities and industry experts.
And that was really helpful to develop the idea to get feedback, to get context, to be
able to ask lots of questions to a whole range of industry experts in New Zealand and overseas,
and really develop the project to where it is today.
So going through the masters of innovation and commercialisation in developing my thesis,
I had the opportunity to present it to the A&P scholarship and the project won the A&P
scholarship grant.
With the support of Momentum, it was put forward for the ‘Momentum Student Entrepreneur’
award.
That has been absolutely life changing because it gave me the opportunity to apply for a
grant.
We received the research grant and that really helped the project move forward.
We're able to find out how plants defend themselves and how we could harness this into a botanical drug.
So this was a really exciting moment. We're just closing the round now with the support of some really brave angel investors,
private investors, bringing both funding and expertise. We're closing the round, filing the investigational new drug application with the FDA.
So, this will allow us to start doing clinical trials in the US, set up for lab work and
the patent strategy and make my first hires for the company.
It's been three months since we officially took off.
It’s been an exciting roller coaster ride.
Botanical drug market is huge - it's several billion dollars worth.
So if you look at Europe for instance, it's commonly prescribed.
The Netherlands has over 170 botanical drugs on prescription and France has 300.
Botanical drugs are commonly prescribed in Europe, mainstream in Asia and part of Kampo
medicine in Japan.
The US has opened a botanical drug registration pathway in 2016 which opens a huge new market
so that's why we're focusing on the US at the moment to take a completely new novel
botanical drug to market.
New Zealand would be excellent for botanical.
It is like the perfect place for botanical drug development and biodiversity is absolutely
unique.
It's got amazing plants here that have some amazing healing properties - that in the form
of botanical drugs can help a lot of people. I think it's a massive opportunity for New Zealand
to have something that it's uniquely good at and to share that with the world.
Being able to address multiple targets and multiple receptor sites, gives them more agile
ways of treating diseases.
If you look at the biochemistry of a disease, there's often not just one thing or one receptor
responsible for what's happening – there’s a lot going on.
So, you have a complex body which needs a complex solution.
Learning from evolution and how plants have evolved to defend themselves against disease,
we should be able to harness that for drug development.
That's a really exciting step I think.
We did an end consumer survey with many end consumers in both New Zealand and overseas.
78% of people would prefer a botanical drug over a chemical and this was groundbreaking to find that out.
It's really exciting step forward to see such a massive market pool there.
And same with practitioners, 70% of practitioners would love to prescribe botanical drugs.
That really reflects that it's really important for pharmaceutical companies to talk with
people that are prescribing their products to see what they need. What do they need in their toolbox?
We have developed a patent that covers the novel botanical drug, or innovative steps
and its application for the novel botanical drug.
Branding is really already in our household - my husband is a designer.
So, he's got a great eye for branding and colours.
And I was very happy to hand it over to him because that definitely is not my skill.
So yeah, Neil's done a lot of work on the on the branding, and the packaging and the
development of the logo and getting to the IPONZ website.
I got a lot of support from him.
I got great support, I've got this amazing IP lawyer, Jane Calvert, who I've met through Wellington NZ, to get
some early support with patent strategy development.
And their support has been absolutely foundational to the company - it really helped me to get
a really good understanding from really early on, and the company's development process
and the product development process, because you know, IP is extremely important.
It's, literally your foundation, the concrete of your company, we were able to look
at some really awesome inventions, inventive steps and how to protect those.
Start as early as you can, see if you can sit in classes that talk about IP, get a grant to talk with
a lawyer on an early stage, chat with a lawyer friend, get started as soon as you can, it
was really outstanding how much influence IP has, and how many stakeholders are very
interested in having a hold of that IP.
So, there are some competitions out there that are offering a really great opportunity
to take your product to the next level.
But in some cases, those competitions you win, they would own the IP that will come
out of the project.
That's why it's so important for students to get in really, really early to learn about
their rights, how to protect that.
And you know, the effect that some of the choices can have down the line, because initially
you're not really looking at intellectual property.
And it's something that comes with invention.
And it's really good to, you know, go back over the science and identify that, you know,
some inventive steps had actually been made compared to other products out on the market.
So it's being able to do that at an early stage.
It's extremely important.
Owning the IP makes it possible to protect the development process of the product, the
way it's composed and all the inventive steps that have been taken that make that product
the way it is.
That makes it possible to raise funding.
It is absolutely foundational to have IP in place to raise funding, especially the level
of funding that you're looking for botanical drug development.
My dad has always been my superhero.
He was a firefighter before he got sick, and he's still a fighter today.
I named the product after him.