The Artificial Lung for Your Cell Culture - BioThrust Success Story with Patrick Bongartz

In this episode, we discuss the founding of BioThrust and the development of their stress-free bioreactor technology. Patrick Bongrartz (CEO of BioThrust) explains the importance of biotechnology in everyday life and how their bionic bioreactor system differs from other bioreactors. He shares the challenges and frustrations they faced in the lab and the support they received from the RTWH Aachen University and its startup center. He highlights the value of BioThrust in the community, particularly in the field of stem cell therapies. We talk about the life of a startup founder, fundraising and investors, and the future development of the biotech field. The gender gap in science startups and the mindset change in science towards entrepreneurship are debated as well.

Linkedin BioThrust (https://www.linkedin.com/company/biothrust-de/)

LinkedIn Patrick Bongrartz  (https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-bongartz-1106/)

Website BioThrust: www.biothrust.com

Linkedin Investor Freigeist (https://www.linkedin.com/company/freigeistcap/) 

Further inspiring entrepreneurs in health&medicine to follow:

Dr. Friederike Kogelheide https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-ing-friederike-kogelheide/

Dr. Katharina Koch https://www.linkedin.com/in/katharina-koch-014174112/

Dr.  Nele Stadtbäumer https://www.linkedin.com/in/nelestadtbaeumer/

Silke Beaucamp https://www.linkedin.com/in/silke-beaucamp-b644a093/

Chapters

• 1:24 Founding BioThrust
• 5:34 Stress-Free Cultivation of Cells
• 12:36 Challenges and Frustrations in the Lab
• 19:23 Value of BioThrust to the Community
• 22:30 Life as a Startup Founder
• 24:28 Fundraising and Investors
• 28:36 Future Development of the Biotech Field
• 30:42 Gender Gap in Science Startups

Transcript

Nóra (00:00.812)
Hi, welcome everyone to the Young Immunologist podcast. My name is Nora Balca and I have Patrick today and we will talk about startups. So Patrick made BioThrust that he will talk about it. Hi, Patrick. Welcome to our podcast.

Patrick (00:18.041)
I know I'm glad to be here.

Nóra (00:20.242)
So would you like to introduce yourself and BioTrust? What is it about? What is your role there?

Patrick (00:26.503)
Yeah, I could do. Yeah, so I'm Patrick. I studied biotechnology in Jülich in Aachen in Germany. And during that time, I already had the feeling that there are a lot of technologies which do not evolve as fast as I would like to see them. And I was already interested in doing a startup, but I had not the right idea or the right technology on hand to do that.

Nóra (00:33.996)
you

Patrick (00:55.239)
So during my PhD in chemical process engineering in the RWTH in Aachen, I met Moritz, which is our second of three founders of BioThrust. And he is an ingenious engineer, a classical engineer derived from Aachen. And together we figured out how to introduce gases or make gas transfer possible in bioreactors without bubbles at all.

And this technology is the core part of what is BioThrust is about. And so after my PhD or during the end of my PhD, we founded BioThrust together with Konstantin, our third founder, which is responsible for the economics because he is the BWL guy in our company as a CFO. Yeah, we started this as a...

GmbH, so as a limited company and since one and a half year we tried to make that rocket fly.

Nóra (02:01.15)
Well, it's so interesting when your idea just goes into a startup and I can imagine that it has also some financial and fundraising and other aspects out of science. So how did it for you? How did you start?

Patrick (02:18.023)
So during my PhD, I already had the chance to write some proposals for grants. And I was used to that and had some experience here. And in Germany, there's the possibility to get the Exist Gründerstipendium, or Forschungstransfer, which is, if you ask me, a mightful tool for a stipendia for founders. And we approached for that. We made an application for that, which...

It was quite some work to do, but I think it's really worth it. We had some nice backup from the university for that grant. And also as we had some stocks, something prepared in kind of the IP and in kind of that we have someone which will be the CFO, not just having the technology team and scientific team ready, but also the economics part.

We felt well prepared for that grant, reached in and fortunately it came out well and we had the chance to work on that for one and a half year with a team of four full -time employees and in the meantime plus eight students and student assistants.

Nóra (03:37.93)
Very nice. Yeah, I think the Exist depend is really a very great thing to start. And you have a startup in the biotech field and this field is still a bit of black box for some of us. So can you just tell us what biotech actually is and why is it so important in our everyday life?

Patrick (03:44.057)
Indeed.

Patrick (04:00.327)
Yeah, I try so. So biotechnology is per definition the technology what transfers biological principles and the products of cells and bacteria and yeast into industry or medical usage. But also if you're thinking about savage plants, this is also kind of biotechnology. I think the term biotechnology was first proposed.

by an Hungarian scientist in the last century. And since that time, the field emerged more and more because we are, with help of other natural science, we understand more, better and better the principles behind cells, behind microbiological activity. We're having better tools. If you think about CRISPR -Cas technology and gene technology to...

manipulate or modify cells, bacteria and stuff like that and life like that to gain, not just to gain knowledge, but also to make products or help for people in society.

Nóra (05:10.316)
Right, it's a very exciting and emerging field where you can just mix different fields to make something useful for the everyday life. And that's what you also do with providing a stress -free cultivation of cells, thanks to the bionic bioreactor. So how is that possible?

Patrick (05:34.407)
So when you're thinking about cultivation of cells, we have to think that in our body, the majority of cells living in close contact with each other. So the only cells which are able to dive or to swim or live in suspension are the blood cells. And some cells like dendritic cells are able to move around. But the majority of cells live in close contact with each other. So they are not used to the environment we have.

Nóra (05:47.948)
you

Patrick (06:04.135)
right now in bioreactors. So maybe I have to explain that a bit. So in bioreactors are vessels of steel or glass or plastic, which are filled with media. This medium contains sugars, nutrients, everything what the cells would need. Also maybe metabolic agents or hormones to trigger a specific function of the cells.

Nóra (06:08.14)
you

Nóra (06:27.276)
you

Patrick (06:31.003)
And in this media, the cells should live right now and proliferate, so multiply or differentiate into a specific cell type. But in the scale -up, if you not just use the Petri dish or the cell stack or T -flask, which some of the medical personal listening already used in a laboratory,

But if you're thinking about bigger scales, above one liter, 10 liter, 100 liters, we have to think also about the gas transfer. And in regular bioreactors, we just use spudges to introduce gas bubbles. And these gas bubbles float up in the system. And the gases, for example, oxygen or carbon dioxide, dissolves into the media, and the cells can consume these gases. And the carbon dioxide can regulate the pH value, for example.

But the cells are not used to those environments. And if a gas bubble floats around the cells or the cells living on some artificial environment like the microcarriers, which they need to attach, the sheer forces induced by the bubble will stress the cell mechanically. And this stress could lead to rupture of the cell, to disintegration, or to a mechanobiological...

Nóra (07:40.044)
you

Patrick (07:54.863)
input which leads to a different differentiation of the cells as it should have. And with our technology, which we call an artificial lung, we were able to reduce the stress significantly in the whole bioreactor setup. Maybe one word more here. The technology is based on membranes. And these membranes, some of the medical personnel already will know that, are used in ECMOs. So...

Nóra (08:22.27)
you

Patrick (08:23.749)
esocorporeal membrane oxygenators. These are regularly used to oxygenate blood and getting rid of the carbon dioxide of the blood of a patient which has, for example, a heart surgery. We took these membranes out of that field and transferred it into the bioreactor. And so we are able to put the gas molecule by molecule over a dense membrane into the media and carbon dioxide also alongside the concentration gradient.

Nóra (08:34.398)
you

Patrick (08:52.743)
out of that media. So we have a close control about the dissolved oxygen inside the media and the pH value or the carbon dioxide. And this is what we call a bionic bioreactor system, as it is way more physiological as any other approach.

Nóra (08:57.58)
you

Nóra (09:09.548)
Right, I really like the idea and the name of artificial lung. I think it really helped me to understand how to really make it stress -free. And I do not really know this market, so how does your bioreactor differ from other ones or do other ones doesn't have this feature?

Patrick (09:27.397)
Thank you.

Patrick (09:33.147)
This is a delicate question as in Germany it is forbidden to make comparable advertisement. But there are different approaches and I try to be as objective as possible. So we're having the regular stirred tank reactors which just contain, as I mentioned, about the gas diffuser or the dispatcher at the bottom and the stirrer. And you can try to run the system with just low shear stress. So you...

Nóra (09:34.764)
All right.

Nóra (09:45.548)
it.

Patrick (10:02.951)
minimize the aeration as much as possible. And this does, the stirrer agitation also as much as possible. But at the end, you need some physical energy to put into a homogenized system. And you can't get out of that. So you always will have some energy input here. And it's very complicated to scale that system up. And the cells will be triggered by that.

So this is the backbone of the biotechnological, or at least the bio -pharmacological production of bioactive ingredients since 30 years. And the main organisms are used here are called chode cells, so Chinese hamster ovaries. And they are the production, the product organisms we use right now. And they are used to that stress, to that environment we're having here.

But now there's a huge field of stem cell applications coming. Some are autologous, some are autogenic. And for autologous, there are also, I think, quite good solutions on the market. For example, the lonsacocoon or the Prodigy from Miltonie. But if you're thinking about autogenic stem cell therapies, we have to scale that up. So half a liter of media or maybe two or more liters are not enough. We have to think about...

liters, 50 liters, maybe 200 liters as a production vessel. And as far as I know, these technologies we're having right here are limited there. There's a company from the US called PBS Biotechnology, which uses a so -called vertical wheel bioreactor. And they claim, and showed that in some recent publications, that their technology is also reducing the regular amount of stress.

cells have in a bioreactor. But I think they have technologies there for 80 liters. I don't know if there's anything out there with biological so that they prove that in a biological field. I'm not up to date there. But we already had prototypes for 200 liters and could show that this works in this production unit.

Nóra (12:16.908)
Very nice. However, you explained already a little bit how you have started to team up and started the project, but I'm still wondering, did you have some frustration in the lab when the idea came that, okay, now we need this kind of technology? Or how did it start? What was the thing?

Patrick (12:36.545)
Yeah, this is a, it was a good question. It was a lot of frustration in the past and I think there will also be some in the future. But when I remember back there's, I started the PhD, my PhD seven years ago and for the, in the after half a year, I got my topic and it was the, it was in the field of biosustainability and we tried to produce, let's say,

green washing detergent. So we tried to produce biosulfectants, so surface active ingredients for washing detergents on a more sustainable food stock, sugar beet pulp. And the cooperation of the laboratory from the Las Blanc Group in Aachen, they had a very interesting organism, Sodomona sputida, which were able to produce those biosulfectants. In German, it's bio, Tenside. However,

when we try to cultivate them and put the gas into because those microorganisms, those bacteria need a lot of oxygen. They have a way higher metabolism as our regular cells have. The bacteria are at least 10 times faster metabolism. And yeah, they also need oxygen, of course. And by sparging those small bioreactors, 200 milliliter bioreactors like the cup of coffee,

we needed 40 liter vessels just to collect the foam because it foamed so much. I mean, we tried to produce washing detergent. And so it was really a challenge to do that in the laboratory. And my professor, Professor Westling said, Patrick just tried to get in that field with a membrane. And for the first two years or one and half year, we were even not able to use a membrane, use a setup.

Nóra (14:08.428)
So.

Nóra (14:13.356)
you

Patrick (14:31.911)
that we could measure oxygen into the media. Our performance was too low. And this was a quite frustrating time. And then I had the time due to another project, the chance to get this very wonderful membrane we are using right now from the ECMO. And due to Moritz and my engineering skills, we were able to produce a module which had a very distinct...

installation of the membranes. We had a look of the fluid and the flow inside of the bioreactor. And by this, we were able to optimize the setup, this membrane module. And by that, we were able to measure the dissolved oxygen inside. And this was the starting point, the eureka moment, if you want so, of the project. And then we...

Nóra (15:01.054)
you

Patrick (15:27.545)
started to make a patent out of that and we had some nice publications and showed that we were able to make it with a membrane system, which this is the first time, as far as our knowledge, to put in so much oxygen just by a dense membrane to be able to get state -of -the -art teeter of this biosyphagin with a microbiological setup.

Nóra (15:51.212)
Very nice. Give me one moment, I will cut this out. My husband is just keep on calling me. Just one moment. Hi Thomas. I told you, I forgot it. I'm sorry. I'm at the podcast right okay? We'll later.

No, Anna is bringing David home. No, tomorrow, I told you. Yes.

Nóra (16:29.388)
Yeah, good. Bis später. Tschüss.

Nóra (16:38.86)
Now he knows.

Nóra (16:43.236)
Yes, so we were discussing how the project idea came and how did you make the heuracan moment, which is super nice from the scientific perspective, and then patenting and so on and so forth. But how did the motivation of a startup come? So do you have in Aachen maybe a transfer center or your professor was supporting in that direction? How was it?

Patrick (17:09.223)
So I think there have to be some fundamentals to make that jump. And in my case or in our case, I already had the idea or the perspective or maybe the wish to start something on, to become a founder. And at the other side, we got that support from the IWTH, from the University in Aachen, which backed us up with a patent and also with...

Nóra (17:26.078)
you

Nóra (17:33.164)
. . .

Patrick (17:39.207)
the startup center which is called Innovation Center in Aachen, which helped us to formulate a lot of things and to get a first small funding around 10 ,000 euros just for building up bigger prototypes to show that the technology is scalable at all. And with that material, we were just able to reach in the Exist offer, the proposal, sorry. So.

Nóra (17:49.58)
you

Nóra (18:02.654)
you

Patrick (18:09.287)
And this is on the one side, on the more organizational side, but on the other side, we're having the, so Moritz and I at that point, and later on also Konstantin, we had the vision that this technology should not stay in the lab, should not stay in the, just in my dissertation, but also could help others because when we reached out or when the university showed that the...

Nóra (18:21.228)
. . .

Patrick (18:34.595)
showed a bit more about the technology on their website. A lot of companies and other institutes came around and asked if this technology available, could we use that already? And just as a research group, it's hard to multiply those objects and spread them. Although there are some hurdles in organization. And we thought, okay, this could be an interesting case to help others in their research at that point, just to help.

them and their research and to enable other processes in stem cell therapy, but also in sustainable research in bioeconomics. Yeah. And this was a starting point in our wish to get that technology into other fields and to other institutes.

Nóra (19:23.626)
Yeah, that's a very nice value or what you want to bring to the community. So that would be also that would have been my next question, actually. What is the value that your startup brings to the community? But I believe you just said supporting other research projects. But do you have something else?

Patrick (19:43.303)
Yeah, so this was just the beginning. And after, well, since the last two years, the last one and a half year, we focused more on one target, on one, yeah, let's say on one topic. And this is the stem cell research. So in the beginning, we had a lot of options where we should go with that technology. But as a startup, we have to focus on one thing because you can't...

cope with everything at all. So you have to start with something. And we focus on stem cell therapies because the pain for the production of those therapies is very big. Nobody has a good idea or a good chance to do that in scale. And we really thought about this could be the field where this field benefits the most of our technology.

So we had a look at the market and Konstantin and I did a lot of research there, had a lot of expert talks and we found out that there's a big need for a scale up technology in the STEM therapy applications. And then we figured out that we could be that solution. And yeah, during that time, we hope that our technology,

will make this tremendous expensive therapies much, much less expensive. So if you're thinking about it right now, we're having costs for one dosage of stem cell therapies about 100 ,000 US dollars. And they are just maybe a dozen, maybe a couple of dozen hospitals in the world which are able to do that.

Nóra (21:36.172)
right.

Patrick (21:37.287)
And it's very costly still. So we think about one million or several millions of US dollars for one application. And with our technology, we hope to get that at least 10 times less expensive. And then we came in a range with other optimization steps that also health insurances in Germany or in Europe could cope with that. And this is our dream. This is what we fancy.

to make stem cell therapies available for everyone.

Nóra (22:10.348)
Yeah, that's amazing. That's a very nice dream and really fingers crossed that it will be true soon. And now you are just like a full -time entrepreneur. So how is life as a start -upper? Can you compare it with the general employee position?

Patrick (22:30.983)
Well, I have never been in a general employee position because before I did my PhD and everyone which is in PhD also know this. Hopefully this is not a regular employee's work. Exactly. Exactly. So, my team and I, we already were quite busy in the past. But for me as a former, let's say, researcher and an engineer,

Nóra (22:41.356)
No, it's not a 9 to 5.

Patrick (23:00.389)
the topics shifted. So before I was more concerned about biology and about the engineering topics. And right now, as CEO of Bios Trust, I also have to add an eye out about sales, about our outer perspective, about the strategy of our company, having the connections to investors, also having always an eye on IP protection. So there's a lot of more

a lot more topics to care about, but it's also very interesting and this is not an optimism, it's really a new field and since the last two years I learned so much about the economic field in Germany, about the market. I met so many very interesting persons. My and our network really boosted up and I'm very thankful for that experience already.

Nóra (23:59.916)
Yeah, very exciting. I learned the same that as an entrepreneur, you just really learn things that you have never learned at the university with economics and so on and so forth, networking. Exactly. And you also explained a bit about the funding at the beginning. So you said that you were writing grants and then came the Exist Fund, which is a really nice offer. But there were any other fundraising?

Or how was the process of it? Are there any other investors? How did you get in touch with them? Did you pitch your idea? How was it?

Patrick (24:37.447)
So last year, 2023, was one of the hardest years for getting investors into the biotechnology field since the beginning of the Bundesrepublik. Because there were several reasons in the global market which impacted on that. So to raise the funding in our seed round was very laboratory. Konstantin and I spent it...

nine months of half time of our jobs just for speaking with investors and made the due diligence process with them. And at the end, just a hand of, I think we wrote to more than 90 investors and just five of them were in the final rounds, let's say. So, and from those, we made a deal with one. So, because they made the best offer and we think this fits the best with the...

Nóra (25:26.942)
No.

Patrick (25:35.185)
vision they had with the Freigeist capital under Magdean. The German listeners will know him. And yeah, we are very happy to make that deal because they support us a lot. And we share the same vision to make the technology making up to the masses for getting thermostat therapies for everyone. And still it was very...

laboratory to do that, to get that funding. No, to get that investment, sorry.

Nóra (26:06.966)
Very exciting. Yeah. And 1 % worked out. If you think about it, that you just go to 90, I was in the last round and then you made a deal with one. It's very interesting. And how is your life nowadays? Are you still in research and development or do you have more management tasks? How do you handle the organization and financial challenges?

Patrick (26:31.463)
So right now we are quite a small team. So we're having now with Jasmin, we hired one month ago, a real bioprocess expert. And so I can focus more about management and the sales perspective because that's what counts for the next round. This is for the series A we want to raise next year, at the end of next year maybe, we want to show that our technology already is in the market and that we can.

make some revenue from that. But of course, the management is a huge topic. Also, we write a lot of proposals still to get some funding to fundamentally the cooperation with academic partners and other startups, but also with big players on a financial ground and to cooperate and collaborate with them in the next years.

So funding is quite a good or joint project is still a good thing to do so. Yeah, so that's mainly what we're focusing on right now. We hired two new engineers in April, they will start. Then also the product development will accelerate.

But this is more Moritz task. I have as much as I can, but he is the engineer and he is the CTO in our company. So that's his responsibility and he will do good on that. Yeah. So from the, I'm not in the lab anymore, of course, I'm on the desk, but of course I have to listen to the pilot partners, to the pilot users, what their demands are, what they need.

And with Moritz we tried to bring that into our new products.

Nóra (28:23.604)
Right, so if you just mention new products, so how do you see the future development of the biotech field? Do you think there are new topics which will arise in the future? How do you see that?

Patrick (28:36.487)
So, of course, there's some interesting things to come. There's one topic which is highly discussable. This is lab meat, lab meat production. So making meat out of cells, stem cells maybe, without harming the animals themselves. But I think there's a lot of going on in that.

marking right now and there will be some companies which will figure out how to make that cost effective. This is completely market driven, I guess. But there are also gene and stem cell therapies coming up and more and more clinical trials succeed. So we will also see them in the application in the near future.

Also, if you think about biotechnologies themselves, we're having with the CRISPR -Cas method a lot of new tools for manipulating the genome and production of a lot of things of proteins are enabled right now. Also in analytics, things evolved a bit. There are some fields and I'm really curious about...

what will happen next.

Nóra (30:05.228)
Yes, I think we are all very curious what still waits for us, what the future brings. So you have also started as a pure male startup. And if I'm right, yes. And that's also what I see. And also some statistics just prove it that the startup is something for the boys. However, it's...

Patrick (30:18.727)
Yeah, you are. You are.

Nóra (30:31.756)
It's getting better and better, but I think especially in biotechnology, I see many male founders. So how do you see the gender gap in science startups?

Patrick (30:42.823)
Yeah, I think this is a topic for itself, but actually we were completely agnostic for candidates. So we had no bias there, at least I think that. But I mean, I came up with Moritz, I know Moritz right now for more than five years.

He completed all the studies at my group in the university. And Konstantin Wothy was with another man, the only one which applied for the position as CFO. So it was quite hard to select someone else. But we tried to diversify our team with our first hire. And this is what we did with Jasmine. So...

As soon as we got the chance, we tried to do that. Also, of course, I had female students in my group, but yeah, there were way another to go into industry, for example, after the masters. The topic itself needs some improvement, I guess so. Personally, I know a lot of very impressing founders, female founders in their research topics. Also, yeah, and I think they...

do quite a good job. And I think also statistics showed that female founders are more successful in the long run and making more revenue. So investors head up here. Yeah, but I think it's also depending a lot on the topic and how many people are there which are able to help you to fund the company. So in Aachen, you know, we have a lot of male students, which also results in a...

a lot of male doctoral candidates and maybe also male startup, of course.

Nóra (32:41.59)
Right, yeah, very interesting to hear it from your perspective, how you see that. So when I was a PhD student, the big question for the future was academia or industry. Can you see a mindset change in science? So do you think that in the future more startups will grow from PhD projects?

Patrick (33:05.575)
Well, this is a good question. I mean, you see that right now industry has a lot of challenges to do and a lot of people are quite fast, desillusionated when they start in industry. You are just a very tiny gear when you start in big companies. And I think that doesn't fit to our self understanding right now as we are.

If you are highly educated and want to have some kind of impact in your company, in your work, in your life, then the way to go to an industry could be a way. But I think in a startup, you have a lot more to do and have a lot more of responsibilities. And this is way for a lot of people, for some people with the right mindset, this is way more attractive to be just than to be you.

one of 100 which working on the same issue.

Nóra (34:06.796)
Right, I like so much the idea because back then a PhD was just a project to do to have your degree. But just to put something more into that and make a startup out of it, it's so inspiring and I really see the future in that. And Patrick, thank you very much for sharing all your insights. I wish you the best of luck and success for Biotrans. Thank you very much for your time.

Patrick (34:33.991)
Nora, thanks a lot for having me in your podcast and yeah, I hope to see more of female founders in the future.

Nóra (34:42.58)
Right, thank you.