Science in the Triangle

Eric Hallman, PhD, and Doug Baker of Kryosphere, Inc. came to the RTP Headquarters Wednesday to give an overview of their company and its success at the June installment of the Innovation@rtp speaker series. Kryosphere is the only independent commercial biorepository in the Southeast. Hallman, the company’s CEO, and Baker, the company’s president, co-founded Kryosphere in 2007. Essentially, Kyrosphere stores important biomaterial samples for labs and research centers in a failsafe freezer factory to insure their preservation. It weathered its infancy during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression and since then has grown into a shining example for the biomaterial management/organization (BMO) industry, passing the 2 million sample milestone last October.

A Chilling Lesson of Loss: “It was with the realization that in this area there are over ten thousand -80° storage freezers that contain biological samples. And hearing horror stories that almost every week someone was losing valuable research assets because of freezer failure, we realized there was a need for a place like a bank* that could store this stuff safely and maintain scientific assets,” Hallman said. Let’s do some quick math, here. With the amount of biosamples one freezer can hold — at an average of $10 per sample — the content value of the Triangle Region’s biofreezers alone is estimated at $4 billion. One power failure, short circuit, or human error could cost years of research and testing budget.

*The Kryosphere facility is often referred to as a ‘biobank’ – much like a data repository – but providing freezers instead of servers. The pair, however, was quick to point out that what they do is not to be confused with Hollywood cryogenic freezing ‘science’ in films like “The Shining” and “Austin Powers”.

Experiencing their formative first years during such a tumultuous economic backdrop, the founders of Kryosphere had an “educational sell” to convince consumers that this start-up wasn’t just another flash in the pan, Hallman said. Even after the market was beginning to show signs of recovery, people were reluctant to outsource what traditionally hadn’t been outsourced before. “We had to assure people we knew what we were doing,” Hallman said. The sell was slow, but it worked. Now their demand is rapidly exceeding their supply.

Baker and Hallman chose RTP because “it’s the crown jewel of biotech”. North Carolina is the third largest state in the country in terms of biotechnology-based development. Hallman and his partners have lived in the area for over 20 years, maintain good connections with the universities (for which they store many samples), and share a love for the community; in his spare time, Hallman plays jazz trumpet and is a founding member of the Triangle Jazz Orchestra and the Jazztones sextet.

In the future, Kryosphere is looking to expand their brand out of RTP. From the beginning, they have recognized that the BMO secret is in proximity to its clientele. They have identified several biotech hot spots around the Southeast with the goal of building the “mothership” facility in RTP, then opening up satellites all over the East Coast: Atlanta, Richmond, Winston-Salem and the Triad, Charleston, and many places in Florida. From there, they can pivot west and hit Birmingham, Knoxville, and Louisiana. And as if a national presence isn’t enough, Kryosphere is soon to announce partnerships in Europe and India.

“Instead of building one centralized facility and try to bring in samples from all over,” Hallman said. “we see ourselves as kind of the FedEx-Kinko’s of the biorepository business—we’re putting a biorepository around the corner from where the major research is.”

Both Hallman and Baker have backgrounds in entrepreneurship. Prior to Kryosphere, Baker was the president and Chief Operating Officer of HumanCentric Technologies, a product development and design services firm, where he led the company through strong growth and operations revitalization. He was also president at Constella Clinical Informatics and COO and Rho, Inc., both emerging growth contract research organizations. Hallman had founded SARCO, one of the first companies to commercialize combinatorial chemistry technology. He guided the company from launch to a $7.8 M acquisition in less than two years.

-Ross Maloney

Catch the entire innovation@rtp program on the RTP YouTube channel.