Martin Schiller, Founder & CEO of Heligenics Inc

Julio Martinez-Clark (00:03.096)
Hi, welcome back to another episode of the Global Trial Accelerators Podcast. Today we are with Dr. Martin Schiller. Dr. Schiller is a scientist, entrepreneur and professor with a PhD in biochemistry. He is the executive director of the Nevada Institute of Personalized Medicine and a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He's recognized for his pioneering research in genetics, bioinformatics,

and biologic drug discovery with over 90 scientific papers and about $30 million in NIH funding. So, Martin, it's great to have you here. Thanks for joining us.

Martin Schiller (00:46.417)
Thank you, Julio. Thanks for the invite. Nice to be here today.

Julio Martinez-Clark (00:51.104)
Excellent. All right, Martin. So let's just start it talking about your personal professional journey. How is it that you got to where you are? How is it that you got to 90 scientific papers, founding a company, raising $31 million in NIH funding? I'm sure there's a intriguing story behind that.

Martin Schiller (01:12.621)
Yeah, it's a really long story because it's you know, my life story Yeah, I think my family You know was interested in entrepreneurship You know generationally and You know, I ended up starting a small company when I was you know, just a kid I was only 14 years old and I've had little strength Yeah, I've had little

Julio Martinez-Clark (01:36.888)
Wow, amazing.

Martin Schiller (01:42.201)
startup businesses along the way, but in college, I really developed kind of just a passion for biology and biomedicine. And that kind of defined me. And the business startups I had were in separate areas. Like at one point, we made yeast kits and cultures for the micro-brew revolution.

So, you know, they were never really connected, but eventually they connected in this last company that's the company for the rest of my life, which is called Heligenics. So, you know, the interesting part of the journey is, you know, I became a professor and worked at several institutions and...

you know, did a bit of teaching and research along the way. And I would say that, you know, it wasn't until I was in my mid fifties that, you know, I had really developed some, strong scientific premise that would resonate in the business world. And, uh, you know, I was pretty excited to kind of merge my entire skillset into one venture.

you know, which became halogenics. So I think that's kind of the overview of the foundation of my journey.

Julio Martinez-Clark (03:18.061)
Well, we're going to speak about Hylogenics later in more detail, Martin, and why or how or the context behind why is one of the first biotech setups in the state of Nevada and Las Vegas. I'm very curious about it because you don't hear much about biotech innovation in Nevada. But anyway, before we get to that point, let's talk about

What do you see happening in your space that are relevant? mean, what things are happening? What trends do you see that are relevant to discuss it today?

Martin Schiller (03:57.275)
Yeah. Well, you know, I would say that the space that we're working in is in, you know, developing kind of a new approach for discovery of new biologic drugs. And I think the main shift in this space over the past few years is, I'm to say the promise of AI.

Julio Martinez-Clark (04:26.209)
Hmm.

Martin Schiller (04:27.153)
You know, so how is artificial intelligence gonna change what's going on? And I think this is, you know, it's an area that pharma is investing in. And it's also an area that's moving, you know, so fast. the one thing to keep in mind is, you know,

of the hundreds of companies that exist in this space already, there is no drug on the market that was invented with AI. And I think, you recursion has one that's in phase two trials, but that's as far as we've gotten. So it's a premise that's, you know, not as proven out as much as like neutralizing antibodies or

or even, you know, RNA therapies. So, yeah, I think it's still gonna be interesting. And I think we have a role to play in this development as well, but it's not specifically what our company does.

Julio Martinez-Clark (05:43.976)
Okay, so let's talk about your company, Heligenics. So I understand from my research is transforming generic diagnostic and drug discovery. the goal is to improve drugs and diagnostics by understanding how gene mutations affect health. And you guys have a breakthrough technology, the Giga, I say, am I correct?

my pronounce it that correctly, giga assay. It can test, yeah, yeah, gigabyte, yeah, giga assay. Can test tens of thousands of genetic variations all at once. So anyway, I know it's a complex terminology or language, but please make it easier for the audience to understand what is it that halogenics does and.

Martin Schiller (06:16.145)
Yeah, like a gigabyte.

Julio Martinez-Clark (06:42.399)
Why is there a breakthrough technology?

Martin Schiller (06:46.853)
Yeah, sure, sure. So just, you know, the real super short version is we kind of adapted this approach where we barcode molecules and because we can barcode so many DNA molecules, we can test a whole bunch at once without separating the molecules. And this isn't really, I think we're the only company doing this in a

commercial setting. And what that enables us to do is something really unique in the industry because, you know, historically for small compounds like aspirin or warfarin, know, basically Pfizer introduced in the early 80s an approach where you could use robotics.

and computers to screen libraries of 2 million plus compounds. And so they took us from like screening hundreds of compounds to millions. So you're looking at all so many more possibilities that we started selecting better compounds and learning a lot more about how to go about it.

The whole industry adopted this approach and it's been persistent ever since the early eighties. But at about the same time or shortly thereafter, the world started using biologics. So, you know, the early ones were like using insulin or interferons. And, but now, you know, it's antibodies and there's, you know, about 300 biologic drugs.

on the market and there's I think over 700 investigational ones in process. And the thing about the biologics is you're kind of mimicking what the body was already doing. So these drugs are turning out to be very effective. And in the last year, half the new approvals by the FDA were for biologics and not small compounds. So it's the growing area. Now,

Julio Martinez-Clark (08:52.616)
Hmm.

Martin Schiller (09:15.077)
The problem, biologics sound great, but there is this problem. We're really just picking a molecule out of the body and going with it for the most part out of the box. So you're relying that nature has optimized insulin to do its job perfectly. Well, that's fine, but we want to use insulin in a slightly different way now because...

We don't want it to just have a half life of five minutes in your blood. We want to have a long lasting effect because we're treating using it to treat a disease situation. And this is true for most biologics. So, you know, it turns out, you know, I mean, God, we've been working on insulin for about a hundred years, but now they have versions of insulin that last, you know, multiple weeks.

But that took a lot of playing around and tinkering over a long time to find specific mutations that could be introduced into insulin that give it these very favorable properties. And so this is kind of a limitation because do we want to spend 40 years to find these variants and improve upon all these

great biologics that have already been made. And the answer is no, but there hasn't been approach until halogenics. So I'll correct you. We're actually doing hundreds of thousands of mutants in one experiment now, not tens of thousands. So if we can test a quarter million potential changes to insulin in one experiment and then pick out the best ones to go with,

Julio Martinez-Clark (10:49.21)
Okay, okay, okay.

Martin Schiller (11:05.295)
That seems to be a really good approach to improve upon what's already been done or to create new first in class, best in class drugs, because now we can look at such a wide breadth. And we're not just testing them conventionally for binding as a first step. We're actually testing them in a specific bioactivity that's relevant to the disease pathology and treatment.

So we're screening against that and testing a quarter million different molecules. we think this is going to be, over time, just transformative to the industry as Pfizer was with the high content screening approach that it developed in the 80s. so I think this is, we've already produced a number of new

exciting lead compounds and most recently we've adapted our approach to take existing biologics and came up with a way, a creative way to convert them into oral or topical therapies or to have much longer half-lives in the blood so they can have, you need less injections, can have better compliance and so forth.

So there are lots of other ways our tech can be used, but we're focusing on what I just described going forward. We have this great capability with genetic diagnostics, but we've decided for commercial reasons to focus on the biologics, because we think that's going to be the biggest bang for the buck.

Julio Martinez-Clark (13:00.516)
I see. So I understand you guys at Heligenics collaborate with research institutions, pharmaceutical companies, clinical labs, and you aim to bring the power of precision medicine to more people. So precision medicine, mean, that's kind of a hot trend, isn't it?

Martin Schiller (13:25.937)
You're breaking up. We got some bad internet.

Julio Martinez-Clark (13:29.896)
Precision medicine, Martin, can we talk about that bigger trend in the industry? What is precision medicine and where is it going?

Martin Schiller (13:42.021)
Yeah. So, I would say that there's kind of two terms that have slightly different meaning. There's personalized medicine and precision medicine. So, I think, you know, personalized medicine is a idealistic state at this point where that, you know, for any one person, we're going to come in and make a, a therapy that's designed just for you.

I think that might be very long-term. It's rather costly. You the FDA has only approved about 2,000 drugs in all time. So it's not like these things are going to spin up overnight. Now, precision medicine is more what's finding its way into practice. But I would say there are commercial barriers for it to enter the market in a big way.

You know, the business case is not as strong for the insurers and the drug developers, but it is probably long-term a better approach. And so the general idea is, you know, if we make a medicine, you know, maybe it works better in a certain population than other populations, whether that's defined by gender.

or ethnicity or a particular biomarker, whatever the stratification is, is can we take medicines and target them better to people that are going to respond? it sounds great. And there are examples where it's working quite interestingly. But remember, for a

Julio Martinez-Clark (15:27.376)
Hmm.

Martin Schiller (15:42.395)
a drug company, and now that medicine you make is only going to get to maybe 20 % of the people it was when you started. So the bottom, the numbers change and it makes it less desirable. we do have to find a better way to incentivize companies to bring these to market. Now, halogenics has made an incredible precision medicine.

Julio Martinez-Clark (15:50.598)
Yeah.

Martin Schiller (16:11.739)
But our difficulty is how do we get this to market because it's not as exciting to investors, I would say, as developing a new drug. And so here's what we did at Heligenics. And I think there are examples in the clinic already, but this is what's, I think, exciting for us is we took a gene that

Julio Martinez-Clark (16:25.923)
Hmm.

Martin Schiller (16:39.835)
causes breast and ovarian cancer called HER2. And this is one of the key cancer driver genes. And there's actually about seven drugs made to it, but they all work differently in different people and are used for different clinical purposes. So how do you decide? And the same problem exists in rheumatological diseases where

You know, sometimes you have to just do trial and error over a long time to find what works. I think in the rheumatological diseases, the average time for a person to find the right therapy is like 10 years. Well, yeah, it can be pretty crazy, but yeah, if you have cancer, you know, like you want a little quicker response time than that.

Julio Martinez-Clark (17:25.231)
Wow.

Julio Martinez-Clark (17:28.611)
You don't have 10 years as a patient.

Julio Martinez-Clark (17:36.962)
Yeah, exactly.

Martin Schiller (17:39.993)
Yeah. So how do you choose the medicine? So we used our Giga assay and we identified all the existing mutations that are known to cause cancer. But then in the Giga assay, we identified about 100 new ones that are cancer causing. But then we tested these against each of the drugs. So we did the same experiment.

in the presence, and we used three of the seven drugs to start. And when we compare those data sets, the difference is we're identifying all the mutations that cause resistance to that drug in that gene. And that's pretty valuable information because what you can now do is if you took a biopsy from like a

Julio Martinez-Clark (18:28.42)
That's amazing.

Martin Schiller (18:37.073)
breast cancer specimen, you could sequence just this key driver gene and then determine which of the three drugs would be responsive and which ones would be resistant. And it wouldn't be like you're just testing three or four mutations like in many clinical diagnostics now, we're testing all of them. So, you you get all kinds of mutations that turn up in people, not just

Julio Martinez-Clark (19:00.632)
Yeah.

Martin Schiller (19:06.841)
the few that end up getting studied. But in our case, we have all this information and we have it in advance. So you can now use this data set to pick which of the three drugs would be best suited for that patient. And I think that's precision medicine. Might even be personalized, right? It's personalized. Everyone has different mutations.

Julio Martinez-Clark (19:24.43)
Hmm.

Julio Martinez-Clark (19:27.99)
I get it. Yeah, yeah.

Martin Schiller (19:35.537)
And so we're actually doing it on a patient by patient basis in this case. And we're, even though it's not our priority, we're still exploring potential relationships to try to bring this to market. it's set, you know, it's one of the things as a scientist that makes me a little sad because, we've had this for a couple of years now and our first license arrangement didn't work out. And I really want to see this.

you know, get to market. And it's a great proof of concept for this area of precision medicine.

Julio Martinez-Clark (20:14.69)
Yeah, yeah, let's talk about the business model of Heligenics. So I understand you collaborate with different stakeholders, research institutions, pharmaceutical companies, clinical labs, et cetera. How do people find you? How do they get engaged with you? Is it a fee for service? How does it work? How do you work with them? How do you guys generate revenue?

Martin Schiller (20:45.861)
Yeah. So what we're looking for is we're looking for partners in every disease area. And we've created a number of therapeutics just to show what we're capable of, but that are also useful clinically. And what we want is we want a partner to come in and say, look, we're interested in this disease area.

We want to license an existing drug or partner with you to create a new drug in this space or to improve upon one of our existing drugs and form like a joint venture company where this will be the place where the drug lives and we'll share in developing it and the spoils. And why we want that relationship is because

Julio Martinez-Clark (21:28.737)
Hmm, I see.

Martin Schiller (21:43.173)
We don't want to just do the first one with the partner. We want to long-term address that specific disease area. So we want to keep coming with new drugs. We recognize that we're not a company that does the downstream clinical testing or even the late stage clinical studies or the manufacturing, but we're really good at the first part, the discovery phase. And so our view is

Julio Martinez-Clark (22:10.305)
Mm-hmm.

Martin Schiller (22:12.453)
We shouldn't be partnering with one pharma company. We should be doing this with all of them, right? We should be working with everyone. And, you know, I hope we achieve at least part of that because I really think what we've built is going to be influential in this space. So yeah, that's our business model. And now in general, just so like if you have

Julio Martinez-Clark (22:35.17)
tunneling.

Martin Schiller (22:41.445)
you know, pharma executives listening to your podcast or, or people from midsize pharma companies that are, would be interested in this sort of partnership. You know, we basically have, you know, we, we get a fee upfront to build a new drug. and, and then we want, you know, percent ownership in the company. And, know, we want to be part of the downstream discovery.

Julio Martinez-Clark (22:58.497)
Okay.

Julio Martinez-Clark (23:06.059)
Yeah.

Martin Schiller (23:11.141)
process to, we want to be part of making new drugs for that company. So, that's kind of the model we're working from, but we also have existing drugs where we're looking to form companies with partners now. And, you know, we're starting to get our first few companies going, you know, that are spinning off of halogenics. And, you know, this is our

Julio Martinez-Clark (23:37.012)
Excellent.

Martin Schiller (23:40.859)
This is kind of our model going forward.

Julio Martinez-Clark (23:44.684)
So there's traction already with your technology. You already have a few companies going.

Martin Schiller (23:51.503)
Yeah. We have two that we've gotten going, but we have three more areas of assets that we're looking to find partners in. One is interferon alpha for treatment of refractory melanoma, for acute myeloid leukemia maintenance, and polycythemia vera. So we're looking for a partner to take those.

forward and we've already found CRO partners that are going to do part of the work, but we need, you know, some VC money to come in and, and, know, preferably someone with subject matter expertise in this space, but we're recruiting that for these projects as well. we, we actually have an NIH grant to develop a, a new version of interferon beta for treating MS that is

doesn't develop anti-drug antibodies, which is the limitation of this current first line therapy. so that's a second area where we're looking to form, a new business with someone. And then, we have a project ongoing where we're creating, oral versions of the Incherton biologics for weight loss.

and type two diabetes. And so we think that that's, you know, an extremely hot market. And we think it's a good place where we can, you know, it's a place for us to really show off our skills, where we could go in to a market that, know, it's people have been working on these therapies for 50 years in this market, but we're pretty confident we can go in there and produce

Julio Martinez-Clark (25:21.685)
Hmm.

Julio Martinez-Clark (25:28.246)
Yeah.

Martin Schiller (25:49.589)
more efficacious therapeutics with our technology because we're, we're examining a much broader space than has been booked at to bring the current, these current biologics to market. And I'm talking about things like Monjarno, Zephound, you know, Terzapetide, OV, Ozempic, you know, that family of drugs. So, I, you know, we, we are just,

Julio Martinez-Clark (26:07.317)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Julio Martinez-Clark (26:16.736)
G.

Martin Schiller (26:19.097)
revising all our materials and going out into the world probably in the next month or two to be more aggressive with finding the partners than we have been to this point. We've really just relied on our network to this point, but because we have some leaders in these fields, it's worked for us. But we're trying to grow the company to be more.

Julio Martinez-Clark (26:44.306)
Yes, that brings me to my next question, Martin, before we end the show. It's about the ecosystem in Nevada, in Las Vegas more specifically. What's going on in Las Vegas? I mean, you don't hear much about biotech companies like yours in that part of the country.

Martin Schiller (27:04.165)
Yeah. Well, you know, we really didn't have a university driving this in the city. it wasn't very, it was attractive from a tax perspective and a cost perspective, but not a talent perspective. So we had companies come in, like Spectrum, Bio Pharma came in and put their headquarters here for the tax benefits, but it really wasn't, it was

Julio Martinez-Clark (27:29.535)
Okay.

Martin Schiller (27:33.869)
It was a desert, biotech desert.

Julio Martinez-Clark (27:35.57)
Hmm. In no ways. mean, geographic desert and no talent, no funding, no ecosystem like you have in San Diego, Boston, or San Francisco.

Martin Schiller (27:41.669)
Yes, that's right.

Martin Schiller (27:49.487)
No, he goes. That's, that's right. And I'm not going to claim we have one at this point, but UNLV has really stepped up. You know, they now have a medical school. We have the, I'm the director of the Institute of Personalized Medicine there. We're bringing in people. And then there's, you know, I kind of got involved with a few of my colleagues.

Julio Martinez-Clark (28:10.506)
Hmm.

Martin Schiller (28:18.105)
about 15 years ago when we started helping mentor people on how to get their projects funded at NIH. So we helped grow the NIH research portfolio for the university. And then once it got to a certain size, we started attracting recruits from outside. actually, UNLV now has a really rapidly growing and exciting research environment.

Now we have talent. and we're, you know, some of the community leaders are now coming together and trying to figure out, you know, what are the, you know, we brought in consultants with the city to figure out, you know, what are we missing in an ecosystem and to come up with strategies to how to build it. Now, you know, from my perspective, I'm kind of like a road paver out here with this, right? Because I'm one of the first

Julio Martinez-Clark (29:14.354)
You

Martin Schiller (29:17.105)
biotech companies coming out of the university. And, you know, there is a couple of huge benefits I found about being here. So if, you know, if your company grows up on the coast, and one of these, you know, mechas of biotech, those equal systems are designed for you to lose a controlling interest, you know,

Julio Martinez-Clark (29:18.269)
Yeah.

Julio Martinez-Clark (29:38.942)
Yeah.

Julio Martinez-Clark (29:46.175)
Hehehehehe

Martin Schiller (29:47.205)
by the time you get through three safe things, right? So, you know, your vision, you know, is geared towards an exit. That's really not my strong interest. I want to build something that keeps building. And so I've managed to grow the company to quite a good, you know, influential size and retain the controlling interest.

Julio Martinez-Clark (29:58.685)
Yeah.

Julio Martinez-Clark (30:05.129)
Hmm.

Martin Schiller (30:17.019)
company. And the reason is, is it can be done here for a lot less money. I don't have to go pay San Francisco rents. the salaries are, you know, we pay competitive salaries, but out here, you know, for the base services, they're less costly. And, you know, now I think with AI, you know, and agents that are going to take over some of the

Julio Martinez-Clark (30:25.575)
Yeah.

Julio Martinez-Clark (30:42.918)
Yes.

Martin Schiller (30:45.637)
those types of jobs. I think that you can get, that there are advantages here. And the truth is, is if you have an interesting technology, people don't mind moving here. This is a fabulous place to live. Everyone thinks of the strip and gambling, but I lived around it. I wish I moved here earlier in my life. It's good living.

Julio Martinez-Clark (30:47.379)
Yeah.

Julio Martinez-Clark (31:05.84)
Yeah.

Martin Schiller (31:15.058)
in a lot of different ways.

Julio Martinez-Clark (31:18.61)
That's what I hear. I have a good friend.

No, I was going to say that that's what I hear from friends. I have a friend who is also a He lives in Reno, Nevada. He talks wonders about the place.

Martin Schiller (31:23.043)
Employees.

Martin Schiller (31:33.637)
Yeah, yeah, good living up there too. yeah, they each have their own aspects. Yeah, yeah.

Julio Martinez-Clark (31:39.198)
All right.

Julio Martinez-Clark (31:42.598)
Excellent, excellent. All right, Mourning. I think we are close to the end of the show. Any final words of wisdom? Any final thoughts to share with the audience before we conclude?

Martin Schiller (31:54.809)
No, I'm just saying thanks, Julio. I'm glad I could come and share a little bit of our story with you. And I appreciate you reaching out. looking forward to see what happens.

Julio Martinez-Clark (32:08.573)
Alright, Martin, good luck with your future projects and hopefully this technology that Heligenics has finds the right partners and really make an impact in the world and benefits patients. That's what it's all about.

Martin Schiller (32:27.651)
Thank you, Lulia.