Repeat life science entrepreneur Tom Weldon is now taking on aging. He is commercializing a compound to extend health span developed at a prominent institution. Composed of substances generally considered as safe by the FDA, the formula has shown impressive results in mice and, to date, in one human, Tom himself. Intriguing chat with a dynamic founder.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Tom Weldon
What Problem Rejuvant Addresses
"... Then the first time the combination is not additive, take it out. That's a process that would probably take a year or two, but it ensures that you'll have an optimal result. Or, you can buy Rejuvant, because we did all that work already..."
"... if you decide that you'd like to try Rejuvant and you go on subscription, we give you a free DNA methylation test at time zero and then we give you another one after six months, which is included in the cost ... They're different and they have different algorithms. All of them except two that I'm aware of, one of which is what we provide, requires your current chronologic age as an input..."
"... It was actually discovered by Steve Horvath and he developed the first biologic clock ... Your DNA is damaged every second that you're alive. Prior to puberty, your body does an exceptional job of repairing all of that. However, after that, it starts to decline..."
"... Is there any evidence that repair is actually at work? How do we know that it's not just removing the methyl molecule from the DNA, and you have damaged the DNA that's just not methylated?..."
"... How long have you been on Rejuvant?..."
How Tom Became an Entrepreneur
"... This company had this trajectory and now it's just gone Chapter 7 recently. That is the tough side of these life science technology companies because the technology moves so fast..."
"... very difficult space. What I have seen in the medical device space, these 510k pathway devices where there is an existing predicate device, and then you can design something which is, no worse and perhaps much better than the predicate device..."
Advice to the Audience
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Purdue University entrepreneurship
Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson
Transcript of “Fountain of Youth”
Guest: Tom Weldon
Sal Daher: Hey, this is Sal Daher. I'm delighted you found the Angel Invest Boston podcast, in which I interview people who know a lot about building technology startups. I now have a Substack about losing and keeping off 100 pounds of body weight in my 60s. It's called Aging Fit and my goal is to build a community of people interested in keeping fit as they age. Look for Sal Daher on substack.com. Daher, by the way, is spelled Delta, Alpha, Hotel, Echo, Romeo. Enjoy the podcast.
Sal Daher Introduces Tom Weldon
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. Today, we are very privileged to have a founder with vast experience, who's working on something really interesting. Welcome, Tom Weldon.
Tom Weldon: Thank you for the invitation to chat with you a bit and talk about Rejuvant and Ponce de Leon Health.
Sal Daher: Excellent. Tom, let's just dive right into it. What problem are you solving with Rejuvant and Ponce de Leon Health, which is Ponce de Leon Health is the name of your company, and Rejuvant is the product that you've been working on.
What Problem Rejuvant Addresses
Tom Weldon: Well, you say, what problem do I solve? I'm not sure I solve the problem, but I'll give you that I address it. It is the process of aging and getting older and trying to do so in a very healthy, disease-free way. That, the disease-free way, is basically what's commonly referred to as health-span. When you talk to folks about living longer, a lot of people say, gosh, I'm not sure I really want to live longer if all I'm getting are those years at the very end, which are generally very low quality.
People immediately say, of course, if I could extend the years that I live disease-free, I absolutely would want to be able to do that. Our objective was to develop a product, a pill, in this case, that you could take and would have a clinical effect, measurable effect, on your biologic age as opposed to your chronologic age, which you can check your driver's license and see what that number looks like. Biologic age is different. It really is how healthy your cells are, as opposed to simply how old your driver's license says you are.
We approach that in what I would call more of an empirical way rather than a scientific way. In other words, we didn't really go after pathways or targets, because my objective was never to develop a drug that is fraught with problems, not the least of which are the costs associated with doing it, and the timeframes of doing that, creating a new molecular entity, let alone the regulatory issues and reimbursement issues, everything else. It would take too long.
When I started this, which was about seven or eight years ago, I was trying to develop something that might be able to help my parents who were in their early 80s at that time. They're now in their late 80s. That just simply would not be possible if I was trying to create a new compound. What we did was, I went to the Buck Institute and joined their advisory board. The Buck Institute, as you may know, out in Novato, California, is the world's largest institute studying aging and the effects of aging.
I worked with them on an idea that I had about trying to create a cocktail, if you will, of grass, generally regarded as safe compounds that might individually have a clinical effect on aging, and that when added together would have an additive effect, sort of like the AIDS cocktail, if you will, except not pharmaceutical compounds. We have a very small family foundation and I convinced my parents to put up the initial cash to do a literature search to begin with, which was a bit new for the Buck.
They're used to jumping in and starting a science project, and basically finding every grass or grass-like compound that had been published upon where the results indicated that there was an extension of lifespan in every model from yeast to primates. That yielded around 33, 34 compounds. We had to bring them all in and then retest them all in the CL again, the invertebrate model. All of them did indeed extend lifespan to varying degrees.
Then it was a matter of trying to find combinations that actually were additive, which turned out to be much more difficult than I originally anticipated. What we found was that only about 15% of those were actually additive, and there was probably about a third that were not additive. In other words, if A extended lifespan and B extended lifespan, A plus B didn't do any better than A or B, non-additive, in other words.
Sal Daher: Not necessarily subtractive, but they didn't--
"... Then the first time the combination is not additive, take it out. That's a process that would probably take a year or two, but it ensures that you'll have an optimal result. Or, you can buy Rejuvant, because we did all that work already..."
Tom Weldon: Right. There was no reason to have the combination, just increased expense, basically. Then there was about another third where A plus B actually canceled each other out and was no better than control. Then about the remaining 15% or so actually shortened lifespan when combined. There were only a few compounds that fell out of that process, which took about a year and a half and cost over a million dollars. The leading candidate was Alpha-KetoGlutarate, which is a Krebs cycle metabolite.
Then other compounds, which were very promising at the time, were berberine, which is like metformin, it's a glucose modulator, and vitamin D3. We started into mice with those three compounds, and these were the blackjack six mice. We started with hundreds of mice at 18 months old, and you have to buy them basically at six and then pay to age them for a year. It's an expensive endeavor. Nevertheless, the first results in mice were very disappointing.
The only thing that did well, the compounds that Alpha-KetoGlutarate, Calcium Alpha-KetoGlutarate is what we wound up going into, because the half-life of Alpha-KetoGlutarate is only five minutes in humans. Biologically, it's pretty much unavailable. Try to slow that down a bit with calcium, plus it's also acidic, and from a buffering standpoint, humans would prefer to take Calcium Alpha-KetoGlutarate. That compound worked very well in mice, increased lifespan by almost 50%.
However, and berberine had a result, and then to a lesser extent, vitamin D3. In combinations, berberine and Alpha-KetoGlutarate, Calcium Alpha-KetoGlutarate, for example, cancel each other out, and it was no better than control. Adding three of them together, slightly decreased lifespan, but it wasn't statistically significant. What we found was the more things you add, the more trouble you get into, and you need to be very careful. A lot of people take stax, for example.
Now, the human is obviously a lot more biomass than a mouse does, but in principle-- and the doses tend to be smaller when you're taking them as humans. You're not taking, 10 or 15 grams or something. Nevertheless, it is, people need to be very careful about what they actually take in combination. In fact, my recommendation is to find a DNA methylation test that you like, get a baseline before you start, add something, and if it improves your biologic age, great, and then add the next one.
Then the first time the combination is not additive, take it out. That's a process that would probably take a year or two, but it ensures that you'll have an optimal result. Or, you can buy Rejuvant, because we did all that work already.
Sal Daher: Ultimately, the compound that's in Rejuvant is?
Tom Weldon: They are additive, absolutely.
Sal Daher: Those are?
Tom Weldon: They're also sex specific, because most people in the longevity space that are familiar with research know that some compounds work much better in females, most do actually, and a few work better in males. The female product is Calcium Alpha-KetoGlutarate plus vitamin D3.
Sal Daher: One second, calcium?
Tom Weldon: Alpha-KetoGlutarate.
Sal Daher: How is it spelled?
Tom Weldon: Capital C, small a, capital A, capital K, capital G.
Sal Daher: Calcium AKG. Okay, very good.
Tom Weldon: That's the female product with vitamin D3, right? The vitamin A product is also Calcium Alpha-KetoGlutarate with vitamin A.
Sal Daher: Okay.
Tom Weldon: We have been continuing doing work. We will make an announcement about an improvement to that formulation at some point in the future. The most important thing is because the bioavailability of Alpha-KetoGlutarate is so poor, even Calcium Alpha-KetoGlutarate. It's pretty much clinically ineffective, which was very disappointing after I had seen the results in mice.
We published this paper in Aging showing an increase in lifespan after two studies around 15%, but more importantly, an increase in health-span over 40% and a compression in morbidity, which from a policy point of view is actually the most important result, although nobody really paid too much attention to it.
Sal Daher: This is in mouse models, C. elegans?
Tom Weldon: Mice model. That was the paper that was published in Cell Metabolism. I think it was the third most cited paper of that year and it was published in November 31st. It only had one month. At any rate, it was a very widely cited paper and it showed a reduction in morbidity but a compression of morbidity and an increase in health-span over 40%. Those were ideal outcomes really and that was a fabulous study.
What we did then find out, since I was the first person using the product and I've been on it longer than anyone else, I then went on that, I bought it off the internet--
Sal Daher: I can report to listeners that you have just one head, you look pretty healthy.
Tom Weldon: Right. Exactly, so far.
Sal Daher: These are compounds, generally considered safe.
Tom Weldon: Exactly.
Sal Daher: Although you can overdose. You can overdose vitamin A, for example.
Tom Weldon: Absolutely.
Sal Daher: This is not readily accessible compounds and so what you're recommending is that if a person starts taking the compound that you have, that you're selling, that the person get some test that shows some indication of DNA aging as a baseline before starting to take it.
"... if you decide that you'd like to try Rejuvant and you go on subscription, we give you a free DNA methylation test at time zero and then we give you another one after six months, which is included in the cost ... They're different and they have different algorithms. All of them except two that I'm aware of, one of which is what we provide, requires your current chronologic age as an input..."
Tom Weldon: Yes. Just to clarify, if you decide that you'd like to try Rejuvant and you go on subscription, we give you a free DNA methylation test at time zero and then we give you another one after six months, which is included in the cost. P ick whichever one that you like. They're different and they have different algorithms. All of them except two that I'm aware of, one of which is what we provide, requires your current chronologic age as an input.
That was based on the theory, if you will, or hypothesis that there wasn't anything that you could do which would have a profound effect. They wanted the algorithm to be normalized, if you will, by your chronologic age. It's really difficult to be very high or very low from that point. The TrueMe diagnostic test, which we use and we have no association with the company, doesn't require that in their algorithm.
If you do something phenomenal, you can actually show a swing that could be, my biologic age has been reduced by 19 years. By other forms of measurement, it's reduction, but it's not that large.
Sal Daher: No. Actually, Tom, perhaps we could step back here a little bit and just unpack a little bit DNA methylation for people who may not be familiar.
"... It was actually discovered by Steve Horvath and he developed the first biologic clock ... Your DNA is damaged every second that you're alive. Prior to puberty, your body does an exceptional job of repairing all of that. However, after that, it starts to decline..."
Tom Weldon: Okay. It was actually discovered by Steve Horvath and he developed the first biologic clock. This is simplified and I'm not a scientist and I'm not a biologist. Forgive me if this isn't completely scientifically accurate, but at least it makes it somewhat understandable. Your DNA is damaged every second that you're alive. Prior to puberty, your body does an exceptional job of repairing all of that. However, after that, it starts to decline.
When you're in your 30s and 40s, it declines rather pronounced, rather, it's very pronounced. What happens is, the damage occurs and your body recognizes this. It sends out a rapid response team to take a look at what's going on. It gets to the cell and it says, oh, great, this is not good. There is some damage here. What we need to do first is to turn the cell off because the signaling that the cell is then giving has been corrupted. Let's stop it from doing any harm.
It shuts it off and then it says, we can't repair this right now because there's so much other work that we're supposed to be doing. Let's come back a little later on, especially in the evening when you're sleeping and we'll do the repair work then. We're going to put a red flag on the cell so that the repair guys can find this easily. That tag, that flag, if you will, is a methyl tag. Alpha-KetoGlutarate, most people think that it's a compound that it fixes something. That's not actually the case.
It's actually the vehicle, the transport, if you will, that carries thousands of enzymes to the tagged site to do the repair work. Aging, in our opinion, it's a little bit more like a transportation problem. A lot of people in the aging field continue to try and find compounds that do the repair work. That isn't actually the scarce resource. The amount of Alpha-KetoGlutarate that your body is able to produce declines by one order of magnitude, tenfold, as you get older.
What happens is, as you get older, the damage increases faster than you can repair it, not because you don't have the enzymes to do the repair work, because they can't get there. Then that damage accumulates exponentially as you get older. Recall, the methyl groups are just a tag for a cell that's been turned off and is no longer expressing, no longer signaling. Death may actually be an accumulation of cells that are no longer doing what they were supposed to be doing. When those numbers become large enough, you reach tipping points and systems begin to fail and then you die.
Sal Daher: Oh, okay. I hear a lot of talk about rapamycin as a way of clearing out senescent material in the body to alleviate a similar problem. This is addressing it by allowing enzymes to get to the DNA that has been affected-
Tom Weldon: And repair it.
"... Is there any evidence that repair is actually at work? How do we know that it's not just removing the methyl molecule from the DNA, and you have damaged the DNA that's just not methylated?..."
Sal Daher: -and repair it. Is there any evidence that repair is actually at work? How do we know that it's not just removing the methyl molecule from the DNA, and you have damaged the DNA that's just not methylated?
Tom Weldon: The methyl tag isn't removed unless the cell is turned on again.
Sal Daher: Okay.
Tom Weldon: At that point in time, it removes the flag if you will. The cell has then been repaired. Imagine being 60 years old and you have an enormous accumulation of DNA methylation tags, which means you have a large number of cells that are no longer functioning at all. You're able to then all of a sudden supplement with Alpha-KetoGlutarate, and you have the repair capability of what you did when you were very young.
You can begin catching up. My personal data shows that I am now getting younger faster than I am getting older. There is hope for the ability to actually catch up and grow younger faster than you're growing older. All of that human data was then captured, if you will, in a paper that was published in the journal Aging showing that. This wasn't even our data, it was actually TruMe's data, the people who make the DNA methylation tests.
I was asking a question of the CEO, Yelena. I said, "You have all kinds of people that are taking every imaginable anti-aging compound. Is anybody showing consistent reductions in biologic age like you tell me our customers are?" She said, "No." She said, "Do we have people that are taking Senolytic like Fisetin?" For example, we have a ton of people taking NMN. Both of those compounds we actually studied in mice and they had no effect on lifespan or health-span.
Dr. Kennedy wasn't interested in publishing a negative paper so that data was never shared publicly or NR, for example. None of those things-- there's lots of reasons why you would take them. Don't get me wrong, they can be very helpful but if your interest is in extending health span or lifespan, those compounds don't seem to have much of an effect. There's been studies since then to demonstrate that as well.
Sal Daher: Who are the authors and when was the paper published?
Tom Weldon: It was published November 30th, about two years ago. Brian Kennedy was the senior author along with Yelena.
Sal Daher: Actually, I'll include it in the notes so that people can look it up. Do you recall the sample size?
Tom Weldon: Yes, there were 42.
Sal Daher: 42.
Tom Weldon: The p-value was 0.06 times 10 to the minus 12, if I recall. In other words, 12 decimal points to the right. I've seen a lot of human studies, I've never seen a human study with a p-value that strong. It basically says it's absolutely certain that Rejuvant was the cause.
Sal Daher: It must be very strong effect because it's not a large sample size.
Tom Weldon: Yes. What the effect was is that you took the test first, then you had to have been on it for a minimum of four months and the average was seven, then you retook the test. The average person reversed their biologic age by eight years in seven months, so it was a huge effect. That's why the p-value was so strong.
Sal Daher: That's very impressive.
Tom Weldon: Yes, it is.
Sal Daher: I like this approach. you mentioned the AIDS cocktail, for people who may not be familiar with this, when AIDS became prevalent in the population, there was a large effort made to find a cure for AIDS, to find a vaccine for AIDS. A vaccine was never found. A real cure for AIDS was never found. What was found was a cocktail of drugs that made it possible to basically arrest AIDS so that people could live with it and it really would not be an issue going forward.
It was not done via, big science. It was a little bit of people investigating these things on their own and trial and error, this empirical approach that you're mentioning.
Tom Weldon: Yes.
Sal Daher: Except, of course, you're dealing with some pretty toxic compounds, but at the same time, AIDS is a very deadly disease in young people.
Tom Weldon: Yes.
Sal Daher: It's not like aging, which is a slow moving process and so forth. Here you're dealing with compounds that are generally considered safe, although there's nothing that's perfectly safe in life. The dose makes the poison.
Tom Weldon: All the compounds, all the ingredients are endogenous, and so everything in there actually is made by the human body. The amount decreases over time.
Sal Daher: Yes, but still, dose is a determining factor in everything. There are all kinds of things in our bodies that are there normally endogenously, but if it's too much of it, that's not good. I like the process. I like the fact that you have this paper, 42 individuals followed. How long were they followed, do you recall?
Tom Weldon: The criteria was basically, I asked Yelena, I said, so all these other people are trying these things. They're not having continuous success. In other words, they might see an increase or a decrease after three months. They test again three months later and it bounces right back again. I said, how many people do you have? She said, well, we probably got maybe 150 to 200 people that are taking Rejuvant at that point in time, which was several years ago, and reporting their data. However, most people don't actually take the first test before they start the product.
Sal Daher: Ah, okay. You didn't have a baseline.
Tom Weldon: Right. I said, well, how many people have a baseline? That was a number. Then I said, how many were on it for at least four months? That reduced the number still more. Then finally, how many people took a follow-up test? That was, I think it was around 50 something. Then we had to get permission from those folks to use their data. Some people refused.
Sal Daher: The sole criterion for exclusion was that it had a baseline test.
Tom Weldon: If they didn't have a baseline test or a test at the end, then we didn't have anything to compare to.
Sal Daher: Right, exactly. Otherwise, or people who did not give authorization.
Tom Weldon: Correct.
Sal Daher: Which were dozens, is like two or three, what was it?
Tom Weldon: There was maybe eight or 10 people that just refused to do it. We wound up with 42 subjects.
"... How long have you been on Rejuvant?..."
Sal Daher: Okay. That is a promising indication. You seem to be in brutish good health. I think it's something that bears further investigation and looking at very closely. How long have you been on Rejuvant?
Tom Weldon: I've been on Rejuvant for almost five years. My biologic age is-- well, chronologically I'm 58 and-- excuse me, I'm 68 and biologically I'm 49. I've also tracked a lot of blood markers, for example, and I have had absolutely remarkable results. When I first tried Calcium Alpha-KetoGlutarate on the internet, I was on it for six months, this was before Rejuvant was a final product and I had absolutely no effect on my blood work because it was--
It's not clinically effective because it doesn't stay around and get to where it needs to go. That's when we came up with the idea of doing a timed release formula. It needs to get into the small intestine. It got to get through the stomach before it gets dissolved. That was, one of the keyfactors. Then when that happened, my blood work started improving dramatically. I am genetically predisposed to high cholesterol. If I don't take anything, it's in the low 300s.
With statins, I was able to get it down to the low 200s. After Rejuvant, I was able to get it down into the low 100s. I just had my physical at the Mayo a few weeks ago, and my cholesterol is now 94. My triglycerides were about 175, then got it into the 150s, then low 100s. Now, my triglycerides are 66. My LDL, which I was able to get it down to about 55 with Rejuvant when I first started, now that I've been on it this long, my last reading was 19.
Sal Daher: Whoa. Minus 58 in the last read before that was 50. I take 40 milligrams of Atorvastatin daily. Of course, I have a very strict regimen in terms of exercise and my eating. Although, the association of dietary fat and cholesterol--
Tom Weldon: Not very strong.
Sal Daher: Yes, maybe saturated fat. I think that the Atorvastatin and exercise, I think, help.
Tom Weldon: Yes, no doubt they help. I've also measured a variety of other things. My gut biome is very different than most people's gut biome. I have been able to build up my mucin layer a little more than six times above what the normal person. Of course, if you follow a lot of literature, there's a lot of data, a lot of papers, a lot of opinions suggesting that leaky gut is a major factor in aging and disease. Everything from cognitive decline to cancer to cardiovascular disease.
I have increased my mucin layer by six and a half times over the normal. Then I also have a hundred times increase in my colonic colonization of glutamine and glutamate, which, as you probably are aware, are hugely important for health, cognition, longevity, et cetera. Just a whole series of interesting things. My eyesight has improved. My dental health has improved. My hair color. I started turning gray when I was 27. When I was in my 40s, I was all gray. In my early 60s, my hair was pretty white.
You can see, but the audience cannot. My hair is darker now. In fact, I have some blonde in it, which was my birth color. Then also physical activity. I don't exercise regularly and I eat what I want. I'm not exactly a poster child for longevity, but I have the blood work of a 24-year-old, my physician tells me, and chronologically or biologically I'm 49. I'm not doing too bad.
Sal Daher: Very good to hear. That's very promising. Tom, if people want to learn more about Rejuvant, they should go to Rejuvant.com, right?
Tom Weldon: Yes, that's the landing page and the scientific journals, both ours as well as other people's. There's actually quite a few articles that have been posted on, published on AKG. Then of course our article in aging on Rejuvant, showing the reduction in biologic age of eight years of age.
Sal Daher: That is in Rejuvant.com. R-E-J-U-V as in Victor, A-N-T.com.
Tom Weldon: Exactly. If you go to the scientific paper section, you'll see that along with a variety of other papers.
Sal Daher: Intriguing. I just want to do a brief promo for the podcast, and then I would love to get into how you decided, you studied industrial engineering, you could have gone into a very nice, safe career, and you went into entrepreneurship and got involved in founding a bunch of companies. What set you off in that direction? I want to ask that question of you after I do this brief promo.
If you're finding this conversation interesting, you can get more people to find the podcast by going to the platform where you listen and first following us, and then leaving a rating. We like to ask for five-star ratings and also a written review. Written reviews are prioritized by the algorithms. You don't have to write much, one or two sentences really is very helpful. Tom, by the way, I'm going to be doing a Substack called aging fit where I share what I do.
I don't have a product. [laughs] All I'm doing is just habits, and I'm just documenting what I do in terms of exercise, in terms of diet. The purpose is just to get people working on their weight loss and keeping off a hundred pounds of body weight. Through diet and exercise, no molecules involved, no drugs and no surgery. The point here is just to inspire people whatever way they can, take that weight off, get exercise. Aging fit on Substack is where I can be found on this topic, which to me is, I don't pretend to think about longevity or health span.
All I can tell you is that what I'm doing, I feel great. I wish I'd done it 20, 30 years ago. In my adult life, I was in my ideal body weight for a few years at a time when I took off some weight 30 years ago, something. Ever since I've been carrying around a lot of weight and since I've taken it off, I feel just tremendous. That's what I'm excited about. Anyway, let's talk about how you decided to become an entrepreneur.
How Tom Became an Entrepreneur
Tom Weldon: I'm not sure anybody decides to be an entrepreneur.
Sal Daher: I don't mean decide. What got you involved in this crazy light of work?
Tom Weldon: Right. You'd have to go back to high school, I think. I was a mediocre athlete in gymnastics. I played some volleyball. I was a B student, B plus student. I was not academically gifted, not athletically gifted. My father had been the CEO of three public companies at that point in time, finally four by the time he ended his career. I grew up around the dinner table in the health care space, which was interesting.
I joined an organization called Junior Achievement which still exists, but it was in a very different form back then. It actually was an after-school program. We started, we started companies, we made products, we sold the products door to door. I found that, that was something I really did very well. I won a lot of local awards, did a lot of national competition. Then when I went to college, I was asked to be on the staff there. I was the judge, actually, of the President of the Year competition for probably 15 years. I had a taste for it. It was something that I knew I did well.
Sal Daher: College was at Purdue.
Tom Weldon: Yes. Undergraduate degree was at Purdue in industrial engineering. Then my MBA was at Indiana University. I asked my dad what he thought I ought to do. He said, well, you probably ought to get an engineering degree because the world's becoming a very technical place. If you want to run something or manage technical people, you're more credible if you have that degree yourself. I said, great, what do you think? He said, well, mechanical engineering would be a reasonable choice.
Industrial engineering is sort of a broad-based, manufacturing-based background. That's what I did. Then he said, combine it with an MBA, which is what I did. Then I decided I wanted to start working in the healthcare space to learn, the fundamentals about the market, where the money comes from, following the cash, because if you understand where the money comes from and where it goes, you have a much better understanding of how the business tends to work.
I started in pharmaceuticals. Then I went into consulting for a little while. Then I started my first company. That was a company called Novost, Puerto Rico, Inc. I couldn't find anybody to give me any capital in the United States because, well, the idea I had wasn't all that great. It wasn't a terrible idea. I had done some work in a pharmaceutical business about putting some manufacturing facilities in Puerto Rico. I was familiar with, at that time, the 936 program.
I approached the government down there and I said, hey, instead of putting, very low-quality manufacturing jobs, I will bring everybody, all of the high-paying jobs down to Puerto Rico. I'll live there, if you only give me some money. To my astonishment, they did. I spent five and a half years living in Puerto Rico. We built this company up, and then wound up selling it to NAMIC USA, who had just come public and then they got bought by Boston Scientific.
Sal Daher: This is a medical device?
Tom Weldon: Yes. It was a diagnostic catheter system, basically. Outpatient use. After that, I came back to the States and I started another medical device company. NAMIC had no use for the name, and I wanted to keep the name because at that time I had seven or eight years of seniority at the ACC and the AHA with the name Novos. I said, "I'm not giving that up."
[laughter]
Sal Daher: ACC and AHA these are associations for the-?
Tom Weldon: Yes, American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association. We were the pioneers in inner coronary radiation therapy or brachytherapy, to treat restenosis after instant restenosis. It worked but it was complicated. That company we took it public and in the first full year of sales, we had about $80 million in sales. That was back when that was an awful lot of money. The company went to over a billion-dollar market cap. It then became obsoleted by drug-coated stents.
Sal Daher: These technology companies, their life expectancy is so short [laughs] because they go through unbelievable hoops to get approved at this groundbreaking device and five years later, they're dead on the side of the road because something else, some other technology comes along. I invested in a company called Gelesis, which is a diet aid. It's basically this molecule that expands in the gut.
Tom Weldon: Right, yes.
"... This company had this trajectory and now it's just gone Chapter 7 recently. That is the tough side of these life science technology companies because the technology moves so fast..."
Sal Daher: Plenity. It's a product called Plenity. I invested and the company went public via SPAC. I had a chance to sell at a significant gain when it was public, but then the GLP-1 agonists came along and receptor agonists came along, and they're on the side of the road. People just want to pop a pill. They don't want something that's going to lower your appetite. They're going to something that really is going to drastically drop your weight in a few months.
This thing had a very subtle effect. It's very healthy. I think it's still on the market. You can get Plenity. I highly recommend it because when I started my diet to take off 100 pounds while was I getting adjusted to eating less, it was really helpful because it gave me a feeling of satiety with no calories but it doesn't act systemically. It doesn't make you jittery or it doesn't pass through the body. It's basically cellulose, that's paper fiber.
This company had this trajectory and now it's just gone Chapter 7 recently. That is the tough side of these life science technology companies because the technology moves so fast.
Tom Weldon: Exactly. That's the game. I liken it to basically telling people that I prefer to ride the rollercoaster than ride the merry-go-round.
Sal Daher: [laughs] A rollercoaster it is.
Tom Weldon: Exactly.
Sal Daher: A billion-dollar valuation one day, nobody wants you the next day.
Tom Weldon: Well, it's not quite that quick-
Sal Daher: Well, I know.
Tom Weldon: -but yes, it's quick. It's a matter of a few years, unfortunately. You do give people an opportunity to make an enormous amount of money and some people inevitably lost money. It is what it is.
Sal Daher: It does move the science forward. It moves the technology forward.
Tom Weldon: Exactly. You have this amazing experience. It's not very many people that get to do something like that. I was enthralled with it and I decided to then stay with it. I decided to start an incubator called the Innovation Factory, and we were one of two MedTech incubators that were very successful. Then after that I started a venture fund called Acuitive Medical Ventures, which was a top quartile fund. Medical technology has fallen out of favor enormously with professional investors and with limited partners.
Sal Daher: Not a good time. Not a good time for medical technology, for biotech. It's still biotech winter. It's been like that for almost two years now.
Tom Weldon: Well, the real problem with medical devices was that the-- first you had the FDA, then you had reimbursement. Reimbursement was requiring trials that had to be done on top of FDA trials. Venture guys were looking at the timeframe to get a product developed, FDA approved, then do more trials and get reimbursement. Before you could really ever sell a product, you could see seven or eight years passing by, and the product was, by definition, technically obsolete at that point in time.
Then you lived and died by what the reimbursement was. The real problem was, buyers of the assets, which were consolidators, larger companies, they kept acquiring each other. There was a time when there was about 12 to 13 large and medium sized buyers. Today there's a handful of large buyers and almost no medium buyers anymore. They weren't willing to pay any more than they did a decade ago. All the costs had gone up, but the rewards, were diminished greatly. All of these C-money just disappeared.
"... very difficult space. What I have seen in the medical device space, these 510k pathway devices where there is an existing predicate device, and then you can design something which is, no worse and perhaps much better than the predicate device..."
Sal Daher: That's sad. As I said, very difficult space. What I have seen in the medical device space, these 510k pathway devices where there is an existing predicate device, and then you can design something which is, no worse and perhaps much better than the predicate device. As long as you show this just a safe and do safety studies and so forth, you can bring that to market.
I've seen a couple of devices, some of them AI related, some of them just a clever design sort of bringing in, I'm thinking right now of Hubley Surgical, which is a handheld drill for drilling the skull in an emergency situation. It has the sensor that basically shuts off when it gets a soft tissue. The current state is a hand drill, which is it's competing with something very primitive. Those devices have a chance, but it's very limited. It's a very tough space, very tough space.
Tom Weldon: Yes.
Sal Daher: Tom, so before we wrap up this interview, are there any thoughts that you want to leave our audience of Angel Investors and founders of startup companies and people with gray hair?
Advice to the Audience
Tom Weldon: That's tough because it's so broad, but in general-
Sal Daher: It can be any one of those. It can be, if you have a message, if you have something to say that you think would resonate with any one of them.
Tom Weldon: Right. This, these are sort of just some thoughts that I have about having been an entrepreneur for, I don't know how long it's been now, almost 40 years. What matters the most in my opinion is to try and find a large market to begin with. If you want to get into a space because it takes just as much work and just as much money to go after a big opportunity as it is a small one. Big ones are very forgiving, and small ones, you make one mistake, you're dead. It's also a whole lot easier to raise money.
If you find a large market, then you need to be able to find a solution, in the medical case, that is clinically meaningful, that actually has a measurable benefit. Then you patent the hell out of it. Then at that point in time, you're ready to try and commercialize and you need to raise some more serious money. If you've done those things well, and if it's a big opportunity and you actually have something that's better and you can measure it and show that it's better and you can protect it, that is an asset that you'll find is worth financing and worth buying.
My perspective of being an entrepreneur was to try and live long enough that something good happens. If you can stay alive longer then you get lucky. The longer you're alive, the luckier you get because the more progress you make and then someday something happens, and you get financed or you get bought. It's about survival. Sometimes I say the definition of entrepreneurship is the preservation of hope.
Sal Daher: [laughs] It definitely is. My experience as an Angel Investor many decades ago, the most common reason why startups fold is that the founders just give up. They just reach the end of the rope and they decide, heck, these are high functioning people, very smart, very educated. I'm just going to get a job and they throw in the towel before they necessarily hit the success. I really applaud entrepreneurs that just stay with it until they figure out the product, they figure out the business model, they get it delivered.
I'm thinking of you, Susan Conover, and I'm thinking of Piction Health which is a startup that is basically developing AI for skin to figure out skin lesions. You can just go to Piction Health website and send in pictures of a skin lesion, if it's a state where they're operating because they operate with dermatologists. They will come back to you very quickly with a read on your skin condition. It took so many iterations for her to discover that, she could have given up and gone back to consulting at any time, a very high functioning person.
I think your advice is excellent, Tom. I'm really grateful that you made time for your very busy schedule, traveling hither and thither. Good travels. I know you're heading off tomorrow. I hope you have a good trip. Appreciate it, Tom Weldon--
Tom Weldon: Thank you for the invitation. I enjoyed the conversation and I wish you the best with your podcast as well. It's a good service.
Sal Daher: Thank you Tom. This is Angel Invest Boston. Thanks for listening. I'm Sal Daher.
[music]
Sal Daher: I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.