BioTech Launchpad helps support emerging biotech businesses

Nick Stuzman has spent 15 years growing a biotech business from the ground up.

Stuzman, the co-founder of Hilltop Harvests, has looked at ways to capture the biogases generated from hog barns “and then use that biogas in a meaningful way as a source of energy,” he said. “After several iterations, kind of like Thomas Edison, you know he knows 1,000 ways not to make a light bulb, we’ve done a lot of that.”

But he found an effective way and now is working on a way to implement it in barns.

From his headquarters in Brookings, Matthew Cole is creating new bioproducts that can drive commodity values for farmers and be used in everyday or industrial applications.

Cole, a corn and soybean farmer, founded Pioneer Biotech “to really add value to farmers but also as a challenge for me so I can grow my entrepreneurial skills and grow the ag economy in South Dakota,” he said.

They’re two of eight early-stage biotech businesses that have participated in Project Biotech Launchpad, a collaboration between Ballard Spahr LLP and South Dakota Biotech.

“The motivation behind starting Project Biotech Launchpad was to form a legal accelerator program for biotech startups,” said Kelly Herrmann, an associate attorney at Ballard Spahr. “And the goals were to provide legal support to startups so that they could accelerate their growth and not be burdened by the initial startup costs associated with legal fees.”

South Dakota Biotech helps with selecting the participants, who then are paired with a Ballard Spahr attorney for mentorship and guidance.

The other participants in the most recent cohort were:

• InovaSkin, founded by Tugba Ozdemir at South Dakota Mines. It’s built around novel peptide research that has the potential to revolutionize the anti-aging skin care market.
• Rhenari by Catalystium, founded by Mina Raver of Rapid City. Rhenari is a wellness and productivity solution designed to prevent employee burnout by leveraging behavioral metadata to detect early signs of cognitive drift. Targeting managers in software companies with more than 2,000 employees, Rhenari bridges the gap between mental wellness and performance optimization.

“Project Biotech Launchpad has been a tremendous resource for biotech companies,” said Joni Ekstrum, executive director of South Dakota Biotech. “It’s a perfect example of the collaboration we’re able to facilitate between emerging startups and service providers.”