February 2016

   When James Olcese discovered that light inhibits premature birth in at-risk women, he created the company KynderMed to bring the discovery to market. Now the company has received an investment from the Florida Institute for Commercialization of Public Research (FICPR), bringing it closer to helping pregnant women.
   “I’ve been working in the field of melatonin and pregnancy for almost 15 years, but this discovery really didn’t start to come together until about five to six years ago,” said the biomedical sciences associate professor and expert in circadian rhythm. “We knew melatonin secreted at night. The way to test the hypothesis was to suppress melatonin at night, which is what light does. Contractions stopped. That was a wild hypothesis that was easy to test, and it worked. It was very fortuitous.”
   The $300,000 investment will go toward a light-emitting sleep mask (formerly goggles, seen right) with smart phone technology allowing mothers to tell the device when they are going to bed. Then blue light will come on intermittently throughout the night for undisturbed sleep. Prototypes will undergo testing at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration before being released to the public.
   But Olcese did not get to this point alone.
   “I’ve been very fortunate being at FSU with the strong intellectual property support that we get,” he said. “I managed to get the patents, managed to get the GAP awards, managed to meet people who gave me a lot of great feedback and also encouraged me to commercialize, and set up a company.”
   In fact, after Olcese received his second GAP (Grant Assistance Program) award from FSU, Don Rosenkoetter, an Office of Commercialization GAP Review Committee member, approached him about starting a company. Olcese agreed and began learning business basics through the Economic Development Council of Tallahassee/Leon County’s Entrepreneurial Excellence Program, while Rosenkoetter became KynderMed’s president and chief executive officer.
   “For a scientist, starting a company is scary,” said Olcese. “We’re never trained to do this. I bombed on business in college. When it gets down to the nitty-gritty of what percent we offer the investors, I let Don decide. We complement each other. I like to say that I’m the composer, and he’s the maestro. He’s sending it to real-life conditions. I had the idea and put it down on paper.”
   After KynderMed began a year and a half ago, Olcese and Rosenkoetter gradually obtained investments with the goal, in part, of matching the state funding from the FICPR, a nonprofit organization that supports new company creation based on publicly funded research.
   “Companies go through an extensive internal review and rigorous due diligence process,” said Jane Teague, chief operating officer of the FICPR. “They are assessed on many of the same attributes as venture capital investors look for: strong technology and intellectual property position; large, unaddressed market need for the product; strength and experience of the management team; the business model; and the ability of the company to raise future funding and grow — plus the economic development potential for Florida.”
   But the benefits of the investment from the FICPR, Olcese said, are worth the scrutiny.