GreenMark Biomedical’s nanoparticle technology could change the game for tooth decay detection


GreenMark Biomedical's nanoparticle technology could change the game for tooth decay detection

East Lansing-based GreenMark Biomedical Inc. is an entrepreneurial example of how “it takes a village.”

The company, which got approval from the Food and Drug Administration in March for dentists to use its oral rinse made with starch nanoparticles to detect tooth decay much earlier than previously possible, has raised or won more than $6 million in funding from large grants and a wide variety of angel and institutional investors around the state, including three seed funds financed by the Michigan Economic Development Corp.

GreenMark has been awarded more than $3 million in nondilutive funding from various grants and subsidies, including two Phase I and two Phase 2 grants totaling $2.84 million from the National Institutes of Health. In 2018, GreenMark won the $100,000 runner-up prize at the annual Accelerate Michigan Innovation Competition in Detroit.

The company raised the first half of its seed funding round in 2018, with the Blue Water Angels of Midland investing $280,000, the Biosciences Research and Commercialization Center in Kalamazoo, which is affiliated with Western Michigan University, investing $200,000, and Invest Detroit Ventures investing $50,000. It raised the rest of that $1.2 million seed round the next year, which included $500,000 from the University of Michigan’s Michigan Invests in New Technology Start-ups program, $100,000 from Invest Michigan and $45,000 from Red Cedar Ventures, a fund affiliated with the Michigan State University Foundation.

A funding round of $1.74 million that was raised last year included another $500,000 from the UM MINTS fund, $300,000 from Red Cedar Ventures and $100,000 from a new fund affiliated with the MSU Foundation, the Michigan Rise Pre-Seed Fund III; $213,000 more from the Blue Water Angels; another $200,000 from the BRCC; and $250,000 from Ann Arbor Spark.

Steven Bloembergen, the company’s founder, chairman and CEO, expects to raise another $3 million-3.5 million in the third quarter this year, which is when he plans to have beefed up a sales team and begun generating revenue. The company currently employs eight.
“We have two global dental companies keen on investing. I can’t name names, but both are very excited,” he said. “Everything’s gone so well, it’s ridiculous.”

How to explain such widespread support for a startup? For one, detecting tooth decay earlier is a huge worldwide market opportunity. But, more important from the stand point of those writing checks, they are investing in the same starch nanoparticles and the same entrepreneur previously at the heart of a $100.4 million initial public offering on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2011.

Bloembergen first began trying to find a market for starch nanoparticles in 1996, when he founded a small startup called Lions Adhesives in the Michigan Biotechnology Institute in Lansing, a nonprofit biotech accelerator. Bloembergen, who got his Ph.D. in polymer science and engineering at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, thought the starch particles could be used to improve the production of paper at paper mills.

In 2010, after getting a $5.7 million grant from Sustainable Technology Development Canada, the company, by then renamed EcoSynthetix Inc., moved its headquarters to Burlington, Ontario, and the next year it went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in the largest IPO in Canada that year. By then, the company was making more than 200 million pounds of the nanostarches at production facilities in the U.S. and Canada.

Today, GreenMark buys the same starch nanoparticles from EcoSynthetix — Bloembergen left the company in 2016 — and adds luminescent tags to them to make them glow where teeth are decaying. Bloembergen applied for the first patent for a dental use for the nanoparticles in 2011, but EcoSynthetix had no interest in commercializing it.

“It was amicable. EcoSynthetix basically gave me the patent,” said Bloembergen.

Bloembergen, who has more than 25 patents involving biomaterials, had been commuting to Ontario from his home in Michigan. He founded GreenMark in 2016. He has an office in MSU’s Technology Innovation Center in East Lansing.

The starch-based product approved by the FDA is branded as the LumiCare Caries Detection Rinse, “caries” being the technical term for tooth decay. After the rinse, areas of early decay luminesce, giving dentists a clear view of the extent of the decay when using a blue light viewed through an orange filter.

Bloembergen has developed a second product, called CrystalCare, which uses nanoscale starch particles infused with calcium and phosphate to restore, or remineralize, the enamel on teeth beginning to suffer tooth decay. He says they will file paperwork with the FDA in the fall and after conducting clinical trials hopes to have approval to begin selling it in 2022.

UM’s MINTS funding for the company grew out of work by researchers there on GreenMark’s technology, as well as other company ties to UM students and faculty. And while GreenMark is officially headquartered in East Lansing, it has maintained lab space in UM’s venture accelerator on the North Campus since 2018. UM holds licenses on research done there to advance GreenMark’s technology, including how to attach the luminescent tags, and how to infuse calcium and phosphate into starch particles.

Many staff members are connected to UM, too. Nathan Jones was a co-op student from the University of Waterloo who worked at EcoSynthetix in 2009 and was part of the team whose work resulted in the 2011 patent the company gave to Bloembergen. He got an engineering degree in nanotechnology at Waterloo, then got a master’s degree and Ph.D degree in macromolecular science and engineering at the University of Michigan.

Jones and his thesis advisor, professor Joerg Lahann, collaborated closely with professor Brian Clarkson of the UM school of dentistry on the research behind UM’s licenses. Lahann joined GreenMark as vice president of technology in 2018.

Adam Laird, who is now GreenMark’s director of business development, graduated from the UM law school in 2018. He was a summer associate on Invest Detroit Venture’s venture capital team, where he led the due diligence process on GreenMark. He joined GreenMark in January 2019.

Jae Young Han, the company’s manager of clinical engagement and customer relations, is the only student in UM history to earn a degree from the dental school and an MBA from the Ross School of Business concurrently. He joined GreenMark in 2020 and continues to practice clinical dentistry.

Patti Glaza is executive vice president and fund manager Invest Detroit Ventures and an eager investor in GreenMark’s funding rounds. “The life science space can be very difficult. What is interesting about GreenMark is Steve’s ability to sell his vision and get FDA approval without a huge capital lift. He’s been very capital efficient and a perfect example of the angel community coming together,” she said.

“First of all, Steven is a great leader,” said Jeff Wesley, the executive director of Red Cedar Ventures. Not so incidentally, Wesley was in the dental business for 15 years, as president of Williamston-based Accu Bite Dental Supply Inc., which he sold to Patterson Companies Inc. in 2005. “I just love the product. It’s such a disruptive technology.”

Domenick Zero has been director of the Oral Health Research Institute at the Indiana School of Dentistry since 1999 and is a paid consultant for GreenMark. His specialty is cariology, the study of the causes of and treatment for tooth decay. “If you want to prevent the early stages of the disease, you need to detect it at the earliest level,” he said. “That’s the Holy Grail of dentistry.”

He said traditionally dentists treat tooth decay “by drilling, filling and billing.” There might be some institutional resistance to a dental product that eliminates a lot of the drilling and filling, and therefore billing. “Everyone is human and motivated by personal interests,” he said.

Nonetheless, he said the industry is aware it needs better tools, and the recent approval by the FDA for GreenMark’s oral rinse is a big validation.

Zero said that insurance companies and third party payers, like the federal government, need to pay for dental services the way medical doctors are paid. “Doctors get paid a lot more for diagnostic services than dentists are. What it comes down to is how dentists get compensated. We need to reduce perverse incentives,” he said, referring to the costly drill-fill-and-bill model.


Source link