Director to ‘connect dots’ for Delaware biotech companies

NEWARK — While Delaware has long been known to attract some of the top talent in life sciences, some of its rising companies have struggled to break out into the market.

That’s why the University of Delaware and Delaware Bioscience Association (Delaware Bio) have once again come together to jointly fund a director of university and industry relations of life

Nicole Merli | PHOTO COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE

sciences to help support the growth of new and mid-stage biotech companies through stronger ties between the university and the business community.

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UD and Delaware Bio announced that they had hired Nicole Merli, who is well-versed in biotech companies and regulators through her past career stops, for the job. Funding for this position was also enabled by the National Science Foundation’s inaugural Accelerating Research Translation program.

“Anywhere you find a thriving life science ecosystem there is also sublime, effective collaboration between industry and research universities,” Delaware Bio President and CEO Michael Fleming said in a prepared statement. “We are delighted Nicole will be leading this essential effort for our state. She has the ideal combination of experience, relationships, energy and vision to make an immediate impact and establish new programs and frameworks that will supercharge and sustain our future growth.”

Merli last served as the director of strategic alliances and communications at LumaCyte, a Virginia-based biotechnology company, and has extensive experience in building relationships within the life sciences sector and translating complex research. She described her job at LumaCyte as a “dot connector,” connecting biotech company founders to customers who would adopt the technology and regulators who may have questions.

“Getting novel science adopted in the bio-manufacturing space is really hard, and you can’t just have industry adoption and forfeit regulatory approval or vice versa,” Merli told the Delaware Business Times. “You have to move the needle on both fronts at the same time.”

Merli first learned about LumaCyte through her work at the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals (NIIMBL), which is a 7-year-old, public-private partnership that focuses on accelerating innovation, developing a biopharmaceutical manufacturing workforce and more efficiencies. She joined in NIIMBL’s early years and served on a team that connected with various science disciplines to build out the consortium which started with a $70 million pledge from the federal government. Today, NIIMBL has around 210 members.

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“At NIIMBL, I was responsible for engagement, retention and strategic alliances for all these companies across the country,” she said. “That really gave me a good bird’s eye view into various region’s ecosystems. Delaware’s small in comparison, but Delaware is mighty — and when you look at the Delaware Bio membership, the small company segment is the largest and fastest-growing segment of membership. That’s a good indicator that the culture is here in Delaware, and there’s resources here that can help them.”

In 2022, the Delaware Bio and the Delaware Prosperity partnership released a study that found that Delaware’s academic institutions were a key driver of innovation and research in the entire state’s life sciences ecosystem. Research and development at UD dedicated $60 million in life sciences in 2019. Delaware State University research and development spend was $23 million that year.

That same study also pointed to the need to strengthen university-industry collaboration to lift up the life sciences sector in the First State. In the years since, Delaware Bio has redoubled its efforts on academic and research partnerships as well as fostering relationships with economic development organizations. Merli’s role is to help accelerate the translation from research into possible companies.

“I get to be in the front row seat to hear the challenges, opportunities, technologies and innovations that these companies have – and their challenges and pain points,” Merli said. “I imagine I’ll be spending a lot of my day-to-day time coalescing the great work that’s already happening in research and corporate engagement so that when it comes to corporate engagement, they’re not wondering how to engage with this potential company.”

Much like how DuPont has seen several spin-offs like Chemours over the years, or how it drew great talent that eventually formed companies like Incyte and Prelude Therapeutics, Merli said the long-term goal is to create a broader culture of innovation in Delaware that sees these companies succeed. Particularly in the biotech sector, smaller companies struggle with spending significant capital upfront and spending years on drug research before a treatment clears the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

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How to help budding new biotech companies make that jump from research to commercial viability is a complex question, Merli added, but she does believe that some researchers fall into the trap of starting to consider sales too late.

“That’s one thing I could see this role being very helpful with, at least with innovators at the university, is to help bring commercialization and entrepreneurship earlier in their pipeline so they can better develop the research,” she said. “Often researchers aren’t approaching this with ‘is there a case for this?’ ‘Who’s the competition?’ If you know that there is going to be some challenge this will specifically address, that makes the process a whole lot easier.”

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