Changing the fertility game
Kush Punyani is the founder of SmiLe Incubator start-ups Spermosens, Diagonal Bio and Thyrolytics at Medicon Village, and Avsalt at Ideon. Working day and night, he is in full swing changing the game on different medtech arenas.
Kush Punyani’s entrepreneurial journey started with Thyrolytics in August 2018, when he together with Mohamad Takwa founded the company as part of SmiLe Incubator at Medicon Village, to develop a first-of-its-kind diagnostic device for measuring thyroid hormone levels in the blood using recombinant enzymes and nanoelectrochemistry. In contrast to the conventional diagnostic methods for thyroid disorders, Thyrolytics’ platform directly measures the thyroid hormone levels, resulting in a highly robust, reliable and cost-effective point-of-care diagnostic method.
– I made my exit from Thyrolytics before the company was acquired by Aegerbio. That might not have been optimal concerning earnings, but it felt right since I had provided what I could to develop that company and it was time for someone else to continue.
Today, Kush puts most of his energy into Spermosens in order to help manage, innovate, validate and put the product solution on the market. The company aims at reducing the conventional iterations in IVF treatments to achieve pregnancy. Current commercial methods to analyse semen quality only look into the physical aspects of sperms. Spermosens is developing first of its kind automated sperm diagnostic device JUNO-Checked that relies on sperms’ ability to bind to egg cell-proteins. The approach will, for the first time, enable detection of fertilization capacity of sperms, and hence choice of the appropriate IVF treatment method.
– I came up with the original idea that led to Spermosens as a 20 year old student working with a project on contraceptives. Instead of focusing on how not to have babies, I wanted to be help potential parents with fertility issues reach their goal of getting pregnant. I came to the conclusion that both competition and level of innovation regarding male fertility was low and I saw a business opportunity ending up in Spermosens.
Another venture founded by Kush is Diagonal Bio, which successfully launched its IPO a year ago at NASDAQ First North in Stockholm. The business is based on the diagnostic platform Panviral, using a technology based on rapid isothermal amplification of a pathogen’s genome and unique in many ways. The reaction is tracked in real-time, for an ultra-rapid and quantitative result. Test progress is monitored using a proprietary and patent-pending electrochemical sensing method. With Panviral, correct and accurate diagnoses are achieved at a fraction of the cost, time and expertise required by current methods, such as PCR. The speed, mobility, parallelisation and ease-of-use also mean that testing facilities can be set up basically anywhere.
Avsalt is another start-up co-founded by Kush two years ago with the aim to build a commercial system for water desalination. Today the Avsalt headquarter is based in both Lund and at Delft in the Netherlands. Kush has left Avsalt to focus on Spermosens and Diagonal Bio.
This way of identifying gaps in the market and fearlessly innovating to make a change, seems to be a mantra to Kush. To make ideas into business, he relies on a network of both researchers and financiers.
– One important reason why I left India for Sweden, and intend to stay here, is the humble environment offering a structured playground for my business adventures. I keep hunting for people that might make a difference in changing the games I enter into. In Sweden, I have received invaluable support to make this happen. This goes for both SmiLe Incubator, that have helped me get in contact with powerful providers of both skills and resources, but also for Medicon Village as a whole, with its many service providers.
Another aspect of doing medtech business in Sweden he finds important is that accepting of science comes more easily here and that research is easily adopted in society. With that in mind, he intends to keep on innovating using his latest business Nested Bio as a platform for consulting as a scientific rebellion, focusing long term on promoting biotech innovation.