3 Houston innovators to know this week

who's who

This week's roundup of Houston innovators includes Michael Torres of CrossBridge Bio, Aileen Allen of Mercury, and Ryan Reisner of SeekerPitch. Photos courtesy

Editor's note: Every week, I introduce you to a handful of Houston innovators to know recently making headlines with news of innovative technology, investment activity, and more. This week's batch includes three innovators across therapeutics, venture capital, and HR software.

Michael Torres, CEO of CrossBridge Bio

CrossBridge Bio, formed during the TMC Innovation’s Accelerator for Cancer Therapeutics program, closed a $10 million seed round led by TMC Venture Fund and CE-Ventures. Photo via crossbridgebio.com

A Houston biotech company based off research out of UTHealth Houston has raised seed funding to continue developing its cancer-fighting therapeutic.

CrossBridge Bio, formed during the TMC Innovation’s Accelerator for Cancer Therapeutics program, closed a $10 million seed round led by TMC Venture Fund and Crescent Enterprises' VC arm, CE-Ventures. The round also included participation from Portal Innovations, Alexandria Venture Investments, Linden Lake Labs, and several pre-seed investors.

“We are thrilled to have the support of such experienced investors who share our vision of bringing transformative cancer therapies to patients in need,” Michael Torres, CEO of CrossBridge Bio, says in a news release. Torres served as an entrepreneur in residence of ACT. Continue reading.

Aileen Allen, venture partner at Mercury

Aileen Allen joined Mercury as venture partner and is on the board of the Houston Angel Network. Photo courtesy of Mercury

When Aileen Allen was contemplating a big career move — swapping sides of the table from tech company to venture investor — she was motivated by driving gender and experience diversity amongst decision makers.

"I've worked for VC-backed companies for most of my career and had the opportunity as an executive to be in the boardroom during that time," she says on the Houston Innovators Podcast. "One of my takeaways was that very few of my board members looked like me. I had one or two women on any of my boards at a time in totality, and very few of my board members had been operators."

"I'd really like to change that, and I'd like there to be better representation and diversification in the boardroom," she adds. Continue reading.

Ryan Reisner, president and founder of SeekerPitch

Ryan Reisner is the\u00a0president and founder of SeekerPitch and The Reisner Group. Photo via LinkedIn

Confident job seekers have mostly been of the mindset that if they can just get in front of an employer, they can sell themselves into an offer for the open position. The obstacle then, is getting through the screening process to get an actual interview.

Until recently, the price of admission for starting or progressing in a desired career was a resume and cover letter stellar enough to catch the eye of the human resources and recruiting team. Outside of being buried in the immense pile of resumes recruiters do not have the bandwidth to get to, standing out in the sea of candidates can be daunting.

Resumes do not tell the full story as it is and it’s almost impossible for applicants to put their potential, soft skills and work personality into a document to be reviewed. So, what’s the solution?

It is a multi-layered problem, which requires a multi-layered solution, but one of the options gaining steam in the recruitment space is provided by SeekerPitch, a Houston-based HR technology platform utilizing generative AI to make hiring and interviewing more efficient.

“I've noticed that there's a ton of people that slip through the cracks,” says Ryan Reisner, president and founder of SeekerPitch and The Reisner Group. “And we spend all our time interviewing people to see if they have the soft skills. Resumes are hard skills. And now with AI, anybody can build the same exact resume. Everybody can say they have communication skills, leadership skills, and a lot of people say they have those." Continue reading.

CrossBridge Bio, formed during the TMC Innovation’s Accelerator for Cancer Therapeutics program, closed a $10 million seed round led by TMC Venture Fund and CE-Ventures. Photo via Getty Images

Houston biotech startup secures $10M seed round to propel cancer-fighting therapy from bench to bedside

fresh funding

A Houston biotech company based off research out of UTHealth Houston has raised seed funding to continue developing its cancer-fighting therapeutic.

CrossBridge Bio, formed during the TMC Innovation’s Accelerator for Cancer Therapeutics program, closed a $10 million seed round led by TMC Venture Fund and Crescent Enterprises' VC arm, CE-Ventures. The round also included participation from Portal Innovations, Alexandria Venture Investments, Linden Lake Labs, and several pre-seed investors.

“We are thrilled to have the support of such experienced investors who share our vision of bringing transformative cancer therapies to patients in need,” Michael Torres, CEO of CrossBridge Bio, says in a news release. Torres served as an entrepreneur in residence of ACT.

The company is working on the next-generation of antibody-drug conjugates (ADC) therapeutics that process dual payloads as targeted treatments for a set of challenging cancers. The innovative treatment is based on research from UTHealth experts Dr. Kyoji Tsuchikama and Dr. Zhiqiang An.

“Our dual-payload ADC technology is designed to deliver synergistic therapeutic effects using highly stable linkers that ensure payload release only within the targeted cancer cells, thereby maximizing their therapeutic effectiveness while minimizing the liabilities associated with uptake in unintended tissues, as seen with many of today’s cancer treatments," Torres continues.

He explains that the funding will toward advancing CrossBridge's first development candidate, CBB-120, into preclinical non-GLP toxicology studies in addition to derisking the company’s proprietary linker technology with dual-payload applications, per the release.

As a result of the raise, William McKeon, president and CEO of the Texas Medical Center, and Damir Illich, manager of life sciences of CE-Ventures, will join CrossBridge Bio’s board of directors.

“We are proud to back CrossBridge Bio in their mission to develop the next generation of cancer therapies,” McKeon says in the release. “Their dual-payload ADCs are designed to deliver targeted drug release within cancer cells with greater stability, precision, and control. These breakthrough advancements have the potential to change patients’ lives worldwide and we look forward to helping drive their development.”

The Texas Medical Center's ACT program is making sure the most-promising cancer research makes it to its life-saving commercialization stage. Photo via tmc.edu

Houston program buoys promising cancer research with live-saving innovation

act-ing now

How do you bring promising cancer research to the masses? TMC Innovation's Accelerator for Cancer Therapeutics was established with that question in mind.

Funded by a $5 million grant from CPRIT, or the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, in 2019 and in collaboration with the Gulf Coast Consortia and the University of Texas Medical Branch, the first cohort began their intensive work in 2021. The deadline to join the next cohort is October 13.

Since its inception, ACT has seen the forming of 19 companies — two of which have been awarded CPRIT seed grants, along with four in contention for one this year — as well as $92 million in dilutive funding and $10 million in non-dilutive funding.

“We’ve recruited investigators and companies from the breadth and width of the state of Texas, so all the way from Lubbock to Galveston from Dallas to the Rio Grande Valley,” Ahmed AlRawi, program manager, tells InnovationMap. “We've had an amazing set of investigators who have gone through the program — 56 teams to be precise.”

AlRawi says that the first pillar of the program is education. To that end, the cohort works with entrepreneurs in residence like Michael Torres. Best known as the co-founder of ReCode Therapeutics, Torres says that one of his greatest passions lies in translating science into medicines. ReCode is a genetic medicines company that is currently clinical-stage. It’s raised more than $300 million in the last two years, certainly something to which scientist-entrepreneurs earlier in their careers would aspire.

A longtime resident of Dallas, Torres moved his family to Houston last year, calling it “the place to be for cancer startups in Texas.”

Initially, says Torres, Houston wasn’t on his radar. But thanks to a call from ACT external advisor Dan Hargrove, Torres realized that the city might be a fit for him and his goals.

“I wanted to find a project that I could help support, sort of take my experience as a cofounder and help guide the next great startup within the ecosystem,” he says.

Torres and AlRawi agree that the biggest successes to come out of ACT so far include March Biosciences, a company from the first cohort, which is focused on developing CAR-T cell strategies to help combat hematological cancers; CPRIT fundee, OmniNano Pharmaceuticals, which uses patented nanotechnology to co-deliver a pair of therapeutical agents to solid tumors; and the latest, CrossBridge Bio.

Part of the most recent cohort, Torres has joined Drs. Kyoji Tsuchikama and Zhiqiang An as the last company’s CEO. To that end, he’s partnered with the world-class researchers out of UT Health Houston to build a next-generation antibody drug conjugate company that he believes will produce “better and safer and more effective drugs than what's currently on the market today.”

All the more reason that Torres he’s glad to have moved to Houston at what he calls “a really exciting time.” He’s thankful for the Texas Medical Center and the relationships it fosters. “We're all sort of aligning on creating a sustainable biotech ecosystem,” he says. And the next big cancer fighting company may well emerge from ACT.

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Houston researchers make headway on affordable, sustainable sodium-ion battery

Energy Solutions

A new study by researchers from Rice University’s Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, Baylor University and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Thiruvananthapuram has introduced a solution that could help develop more affordable and sustainable sodium-ion batteries.

The findings were recently published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

The team worked with tiny cone- and disc-shaped carbon materials from oil and gas industry byproducts with a pure graphitic structure. The forms allow for more efficient energy storage with larger sodium and potassium ions, which is a challenge for anodes in battery research. Sodium and potassium are more widely available and cheaper than lithium.

“For years, we’ve known that sodium and potassium are attractive alternatives to lithium,” Pulickel Ajayan, the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor of Engineering at Rice, said in a news release. “But the challenge has always been finding carbon-based anode materials that can store these larger ions efficiently.”

Lithium-ion batteries traditionally rely on graphite as an anode material. However, traditional graphite structures cannot efficiently store sodium or potassium energy, since the atoms are too big and interactions become too complex to slide in and out of graphite’s layers. The cone and disc structures “offer curvature and spacing that welcome sodium and potassium ions without the need for chemical doping (the process of intentionally adding small amounts of specific atoms or molecules to change its properties) or other artificial modifications,” according to the study.

“This is one of the first clear demonstrations of sodium-ion intercalation in pure graphitic materials with such stability,” Atin Pramanik, first author of the study and a postdoctoral associate in Ajayan’s lab, said in the release. “It challenges the belief that pure graphite can’t work with sodium.”

In lab tests, the carbon cones and discs stored about 230 milliamp-hours of charge per gram (mAh/g) by using sodium ions. They still held 151 mAh/g even after 2,000 fast charging cycles. They also worked with potassium-ion batteries.

“We believe this discovery opens up a new design space for battery anodes,” Ajayan added in the release. “Instead of changing the chemistry, we’re changing the shape, and that’s proving to be just as interesting.”

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This story originally appeared on EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

FAA demands investigation into SpaceX's out-of-control Starship flight

Out of this world

The Federal Aviation Administration is demanding an accident investigation into the out-of-control Starship flight by SpaceX on May 27.

Tuesday's test flight from Texas lasted longer than the previous two failed demos of the world's biggest and most powerful rocket, which ended in flames over the Atlantic. The latest spacecraft made it halfway around the world to the Indian Ocean, but not before going into a spin and breaking apart.

The FAA said Friday that no injuries or public damage were reported.

The first-stage booster — recycled from an earlier flight — also burst apart while descending over the Gulf of Mexico. But that was the result of deliberately extreme testing approved by the FAA in advance.

All wreckage from both sections of the 403-foot (123-meter) rocket came down within the designated hazard zones, according to the FAA.

The FAA will oversee SpaceX's investigation, which is required before another Starship can launch.

CEO Elon Musk said he wants to pick up the pace of Starship test flights, with the ultimate goal of launching them to Mars. NASA needs Starship as the means of landing astronauts on the moon in the next few years.

TMC med-tech company closes $2.5M series A, plans expansion

fresh funding

Insight Surgery, a United Kingdom-based startup that specializes in surgical technology, has raised $2.5 million in a series A round led by New York City-based life sciences investor Nodenza Venture Partners. The company launched its U.S. business in 2023 with the opening of a cleanroom manufacturing facility at Houston’s Texas Medical Center.

The startup says the investment comes on the heels of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granting clearance to the company’s surgical guides for orthopedic surgery. Insight says the fresh capital will support its U.S. expansion, including one new manufacturing facility at an East Coast hospital and another at a West Coast hospital.

Insight says the investment “will provide surgeons with rapid access to sophisticated tools that improve patient outcomes, reduce risk, and expedite recovery.”

Insight’s proprietary digital platform, EmbedMed, digitizes the surgical planning process and allows the rapid design and manufacturing of patient-specific guides for orthopedic surgery.

“Our mission is to make advanced surgical planning tools accessible and scalable across the U.S. healthcare system,” Insight CEO Henry Pinchbeck said in a news release. “This investment allows us to accelerate our plan to enable every orthopedic surgeon in the U.S. to have easy access to personalized surgical devices within surgically meaningful timelines.”

Ross Morton, managing Partner at Nodenza, says Insight’s “disruptive” technology may enable the company to become “the leader in the personalized surgery market.”

The startup recently entered a strategic partnership with Ricoh USA, a provider of information management and digital services for businesses. It also has forged partnerships with the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, University of Chicago Medicine, University of Florida Health and UAB Medicine in Birmingham, Alabama.

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