The life sciences company Varro has picked St. Louis as where it wants to grow as it looks to develop commercially available medical devices that can rapidly detect pathogens easily spread through the air such as the flu, COVID and RSV.
Varro’s new lab space in one of the Cortex Innovation District buildings is still in the early stages of being built. It’s mostly empty lab benches and wire racks for now, but in a matter of weeks, it will house the company’s space for research and development space and manufacturing clean room.
“Our manufacturing is going to look a little different than most biotech companies,” said Varro CEO Tom Cirrito. “It actually looks like a semiconductor facility because our biosensor is essentially a semiconductor.”
Varro looks to bring forthcoming diagnostic devices to the market built around a “micro immuno electrode” that Cirrito described as the company’s “secret sauce.”
“It’s essentially a bridge between a semiconductor and the biological world,” Cirrito said. “It’s a platform technology, which means there’s many different applications that you could develop.”
Initially, the company is looking to develop two devices, he said. One will be able to detect the presence of pathogens from a single breath in about a minute with the same sensitivity as a PCR test.
“It’s better, faster, cheaper, easier to use,” he said. “All of the things you want.”
The other device uses the same technology but would sit in a room and continuously sample the air around it to detect if an infectious person entered and was releasing particles into the air, Cirrito explained.
“If somebody would enter a standard size room, a 20-by-25-foot conference room, say, our device could sense the presence of that sick individual faster than many, if not most of the people in that space could be infected,” he said. “There’s never been a device that can do this before.”
It builds on published research from Washington University on the matter and is a family affair for Cirrito. His brother, John, is one of the WashU researchers behind the scientific innovation at the core of Varro, which was founded in February 2020.
“It was really just an amazing convergence of events that his technology was squarely in the space that we had committed to as a company,” Cirrito saad. “Our main functions for those first four years was to support our scientific founders and work with them to secure non-dilutive funding.”
The move back to St. Louis now made sense for Cirrito, who had spent almost two decades in New York City founding other biotech companies and leading them through research, development and product deployment.
“As we were approaching a clinical trial, it became clear to me that coming back to St. Louis was the best way to move Varro forward,” he said. “Be closer to the technology, the clinical study, and start to build our operations here: R&D, manufacturing.”
The company is actively hiring for four positions right now and expects to have 30 employees by the end of the year, including lab personnel and some senior leadership, he said. Cirrito declined to say how much those hires would earn, but said the highly skilled positions would be “paid competitively.”
The growth is partially enabled by $20 million in non-dilutive capital support from Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum.
That investment has Cirrito aiming to launch a clinical trial for a device that can detect COVID, Flu A and Flu B by the next flu and COVID season at the end of this year or early next. It’s a tight schedule to have the lab built fully built out with R&D and manufacturing capabilities, he said.
“Everybody thinks, oh, you raised $20 million you know, you're sitting pretty,” Cirrito said. “But the reality is that you raise the $20 million and then the real work begins.”
Having a company like Varro decide to establish itself in the St. Louis region is exciting, said Cortex President and CEO Sam Fiorello.
“This is a company that could be built and grow anywhere,” he said. “They can go anywhere. People are courting them and want them. The fact that they’re growing here is a great testament to what we’ve built.”
Part of that, in Fiorello’s eyes, is the network of people he and others have deployed to support the growing company.
“It is something that St. Louis is uniquely suited to do well,” he said. “We have relationships and networks and can connect [Varro] with folks who have a pipeline of talent. You don’t have to know everyone because we do.”
Cirrito said he was surprised by his experience with the depth of talent available in the St. Louis region, especially since the positions his company is hiring for require complex and specialized skill sets. But of the four positions open right now, he said he has excellent candidates for all of them.
“The idea that there’s people here who are perfect for that role, this company and this technology is mind-boggling,” Cirrito said. “There are probably low single-digit people who are really good candidates on the planet. And I think that we’ve found potentially some of the best possible, if not the best possible, candidates already in St. Louis.”
He added that this wouldn’t have happened in other regions in the U.S. with larger biotech footprints, such as Boston or San Francisco.
That’s an important message about St. Louis from an equally important messenger, Fiorello said.
“Someone like Tom, who is coming into our community, who’s a serial entrepreneur, done this a lot, invested in companies, grown and built companies,” he said. “Tom brings in investors from the East Coast and West Coast. That’s new money to the region.”
And fresh eyes to see the other advancements and opportunities being developed throughout the St. Louis region, Fiorello added.
“It means a hell of a lot more if it’s a West Coast investor that has no tie to St. Louis saying, ‘Man, you should look at St. Louis because I just made an investment, and it was incredible,’” he said.
