Local man's company raises $40m for liver research

A company led by a 29-year-old Mount Temple man has raised $40 million in investment toward the development of innovative new treatments for liver disease.

Jack O'Meara is the CEO and co-founder of Ochre Bio, an Oxford-based company that is working to develop RNA medicines for liver disease and is testing its drugs on hundreds of donated human livers that are being kept alive in laboratories in New York.

This month, the Financial Times, The Currency and The Wall Street Journal were among the news organisations to report on Ochre Bio's success in recently raising $30m toward the development of its liver treatments.

This follows on from the three-year-old company generating $10m in seed funding, in 2020 and 2021, to help begin its work.

Speaking to the Westmeath Independent this week, Jack O'Meara says the company is very proud of the progress it has made in a relatively short space of time.

He explains that Ochre Bio is developing its treatments using technologies such as genomics, to find new biological approaches, and then testing its products directly on human livers rather than on mice.

The donor livers used in the testing are ones which cannot be used for transplant because they are diseased, old or fatty.

"The science is really interesting and elegant and I think it's piquing people's imaginations," Jack says.

The first treatment being developed by the company will aim to improve the quality of donated livers before they are used in liver transplant operations.

He says that, because people are now living longer and eating more processed foods, the quality of donated livers has deteriorated.

"As a result, there's a higher risk of these livers failing after they're transplanted. So the first products we're trying to make are basically to treat the liver, before it undergoes the transplant, to reduce that risk of it failing and ultimately to improve the outcome for patients.

"Surgeons usually have to throw away about 20 to 30% of donor livers - they might say that they're not comfortable taking a risk on that one because it's a bit too old or a bit too fat.

"There's a massive shortage of organs, so we're hoping that this product will give surgeons confidence that they can use more of the older and fatter donor livers and ultimately get transplants to more people who need them."

He is hopeful that that the first clinical trials on the treatment for donated livers will take place in the latter half of 2024, and thereafter Ochre Bio intends to develop drugs for other forms of liver disease.

"We hope to move onto bigger diseases like chronic liver diseases; such as NASH, which is obesity-derived liver failure; and maybe even liver cirrhosis due to alcoholism, depending on how our product portfolio emerges.

"We're trying to really develop a portfolio of medicines for liver disease."

Jack, a son of Anne Russell and Paul O'Meara, is a past pupil of the Marist College and Moate Community School.

In years gone by he has played music in the Auld Shebeen, among other pubs in Moate, has performed in the Dean Crowe Theatre, and has lined out for Temple Villa FC and Caulry GAA club.

He has also volunteered in Nepal and Tanzania, and this desire to help in developing countries is something he shares with his co-founder of Ochre Bio, Quin Wills.

The two men met in London in 2019, at Entrepreneur First, a programme Jack likens to 'Love Island' for start-ups.

"They basically take entrepreneurs and technical experts and try to get them to speed-date and get to know each other," he says. "I heard Quin's pitch and it was right on the money with what I wanted to try and do. We really hit it off. We're yin to each other's yang.

"He's a visionary, strong South African guy and I'm kind of a quirky Irish counterpart who's more commercially minded, and less in the weeds of the science, so it felt like a good pairing."

Ochre Bio currently employs 45 people and, in addition to its main office in Oxford, it has an "organ clinic" in New York and a small team working in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan.

Jack says that, in addition to the finance raised recently, the company has been able to bring in some "top-tier" investors who "can add a lot of strategic value" in addition to their monetary support.

He said one of the recent additions to the company's board was Nessan Bermingham, who founded Intellia Therapeutics, a leading genome editing company.

"He helped to grow that company into a few hundred people, into a much bigger organisation, so he should be a good person to have in the room to help us think about doing things properly from the get-go, so that we have the foundations in place to really move products into the clinical (trial phase) and hopefully scale the business to support that over the years to come."

Jack's background is in biomedical engineering, which he studied at NUI Galway. One of his previous initiatives, which he started with Malcolm Phelan, an American whose mother was from Athlone, was called Venture for Ireland.

This was a company which worked to secure placements for Irish graduates at tech and start-up companies in California and other parts of the US.

"It was a labour of love, and we ultimately had to wind it up, but it was a great learning experience and a great way to meet people and develop an understanding of how the entrepreneurial ecosystem works," Jack recalls.

He lived in the US for many years himself, working in healthcare. A role he took on with a gene therapy company in Chicago, called AveXis, proved to be "a real eye-opener".

"The gene therapy space is a basically a new area of medicine that has transformative ability to ultimately make curative treatments for really debilitating diseases," he says.

"The disease we were working on at the time was a rare genetic disease that affected children. Basically, if you were born with it you had about two-to-five years of life expectancy. It was really tragic for families involved, a very rare but horrific disease.

"When I was with AveXis, I was part of the development of this drug that effectively cured it.

"They had kids coming in to visit us, where I was working, who were running around, aged six or seven, with full functionality. It was like this 'wow' moment for me, because this was really game-changing technology.

"I was then marrying my two interests at that point; entrepreneurship more generally, ie. how to get companies started and catalyse innovation, and a keen interest in this new and emerging field of advanced medicine and advanced biotechnology products."

Now living in London, he travels home quite frequently and made one of his journeys back to the Athlone area on Friday last.

"When I was in the States I hardly ever got home. Now I come home so often that they're getting sick of me! But I love it," he says.

Given the progress his company has made recently, he is justifiably hopeful about what the future might bring.

While the biopharmaceutical sector can get bad press at times, he points out that the work it does carries the potential to benefit countless lives.

"It is fundamentally one of the few areas where, day-in and day-out, if we are successful, we can have a huge impact on so many people's lives in a really positive way. That is a really inspiring thing to think about when you're going into work.

"It's a hard job. Trying to get investors can be hard work, and there's always a lot of stress involved in getting set up. But, at the end of the day, if it works, you could make something that fundamentally saves people's loved ones.

"So it's a hugely rewarding field to work in. I'm really excited about what we're doing, and I really do think we'll make a big impact in the years to come. But we've a long way to go yet," he concludes.