“The RSE Enterprise Fellowship was a life saver for me. It gave me a runway to get the company off the ground and the tools and expertise to carve out the structure and purpose of the company.”
Caroline Barelle, CEO Elasmogen
Caroline Barelle was awarded an Enterprise Fellowship in April 2015. Due to the bioscience nature of her commercialisation project, Caroline’s award was co-funded by Scottish Enterprise and BBSRC.
The aim of Caroline’s Fellowship was to spin-out a new biotech company – Elasmogen – from the University of Aberdeen. Elasmogen is a next generation, therapeutic biologics company that develops soloMERs to help treat disease, such as inflammatory eye disease.
Recognising that traditional antibodies are expensive to produce and, are also large, complex molecules that cannot easily penetrate tissues in the body, Caroline saw a market opportunity for Elasmogen to produce SoloMERs which offer a cheaper, less invasive and more effective solution for the treatment of autoimmune diseases.
During the Fellowship Caroline and her team accrued significant supporting data for the product, outlined a product pipeline and developed a robust IP protected portfolio to cover the platform, the production process and the product.
Caroline also took part in Converge Challenge during her Fellowship. She was awarded second place in the prestigeous Scotland-wide company creation competition & entrepreneurship programme which is open to staff and students from Scottish Universities. Shortly afterwards, and before the end of her Fellowship, Elasmogen spun out of the University of Aberdeen.
Caroline is currently presenting all over the world, securing investment to expand clinical trails whilst negotiating sales with several pharma companies.