Brilliant Spanish postdoc, Carlos Castro-González, goes to MIT’s “Magic Wand” lab, and joins a superb international team to address an important medical problem. Leuko, their startup, now has a device and software that can tell when cancer patients are becoming immuno-compromised. Leuko’s product has the potential of saving 4,000 lives and $1.5 billion every year by cutting in half opportunistic infections associated with chemotherapy.
SOME HIGHLIGHTS FROM THIS CHARMING CONVERSATION WITH A WELL-SPOKEN SCIENTIST & FOUNDER
- Carlos Castro-González bio.
- What Leuko does.
- How the company came about.
- How Carlos became an unlikely entrepreneur.
- MIT’s Martha Gray Lab, often called the “Magic Wand” lab building a new approach to applying technology to real-world medical problems.
- What the device and software actually do.
- Potential impact.
- Who might pay for this product?
- How much money and time will it take to get the product to market?
- Licensing the technology from MIT.
- Team ideally suited to technological task, but created entirely by accident.
- Have worked well for four years.
- Four founders have passed up well-paid and safe positions in industry to get this company going.
- PlenOptika came from the Martha Gray Lab as well and share space with Leuko
- Commercial input from MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service.
- Advice to other scientist/founders form a company more than a year before leaving academia to apply for non-dilutive funding for the company. When the funding is granted then separate from the university to avoid conflicts of interest. Heard this from another founder.
- Carlos advises potential founders to broaden their network to investors and people with commercial experience.
- Super-connectors.
- Being coachable and listening to advice.
- Reporting frequently and succinctly is valuable. Having a narrative thread that ties one report to the previous one.
- Reports as a way of eliciting help from investors.
- Process of interviewing physicians took care to ensure candid opinions. Concrete steps to get unguarded responses.
