SOMER BARBUREK OF HERA BIOTECH

“And it's only in the current, social environment that people are starting to recognize that there is absolutely an economic argument to investing in things that are solely geared towards women.” - Somer Barburek

Somer currently serves as the President & CEO of Hera Biotech, a women’s health company focused on commercializing a non-surgical diagnostic for early detection of endometriosis. Before founding Hera, Somer spent ten years in life science venture capital at Targeted Technology Fund, the largest life science fund in San Antonio. During her time with Targeted Tech, she also served as the Director of Clinical Operations for Santalis Pharmaceuticals where she built out the clinical program at the company over seven years. During her tenure, Santalis expanded its clinical program from a single IND to four active INDs; and from 2 domestic clinical trials to over 10 clinical trials, including 2 international trials. Somer earned her MBA with a specialization in Data Analytics, from Louisiana State University, and prior to her work with the Targeted Technology Fund and Santalis, Somer attended the University of Texas San Antonio where she graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in entrepreneurship and was the winner of the prestigious C.I.T.E. (Center for Innovation Technology and Entrepreneurship) annual student competition, with a women’s health technology she invented.

Can you tell us about Hera Biotech and how you see it transforming the biotech industry?

One of the unique things about HERA is that we're founded on the premise that women's health is underserved, and there is a lot of technology and innovation that is being applied in other areas of medicine that haven't been applied to women's health. So, I love that our mission is to better understand the root cause of diseases, better diagnose, track progression, and eventually treat them. 

We understand that to have a robust and meaningful treatment for a disease, there are many things that you need to know and understand upfront. So, we've started there as opposed to working backward and saying what we think that target might be good for. 

I think it's the first company, at least that I've experienced, that is taking an approach of knowledge, taking innovations applied in other areas, applying them in novel indications, and truly developing a holistic approach to personalized medicine.

Why do so few life sciences VCs invest in female-focused products and how does this uniquely position Hera within the market?

It's an epigenetic problem in life science investing, it's that women haven't been a focus of research. There haven't been innovations that were specifically geared toward women. And I take the rather optimistic approach that I don't believe that life science VCs are out there with the position that they don’t invest in women or women’s health. I think that they have done what they thought was investing in women. 

And it's only in the current, social environment that people are starting to recognize that there is absolutely an economic argument to investing in things that are solely geared towards women. The first wave of Femtech was very geared toward the consumer, which is not a focus of life science VCs. Now in this second wave of Femtech, you see a more life-science approach to female-based problems, which I’m hopeful will attract the attention of these life-science VCs.

This is the first opportunity that the women's health community or the Femtech community has had to engage those traditional life science VCs and have products that are of interest.  So, you're going to start seeing it, we've just got to get these first few companies in there. 

How has your background in VC uniquely positioned you to move this company forward toward IPO?

Having a VC position is always helpful because it gives you a bit of insight into who is sitting on the other side of the table and who speaks their language. You at least get a general sense of what you expected to see when you were sitting in that seat. So that uniquely positions me to have very candid conversations with VCs.

I think it helps me communicate our work in terms that are motivating or inspiring to investors.

 When building your team at Hera Biotech, what is one of the main characteristics that you look for in potential candidates?

There are a lot of fantastic scientists out there and I equate this a lot to the DE&I initiatives that you see now in larger companies. You'll see these listings where it says, fortune 100 company X is looking for a chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer and all they want is someone who's got 25 years of experience in that field. But, we didn't have that 25 years ago, so please stop with this requirement. 

For us, it's not necessarily about somebody having a background in women's health. I love disparate backgrounds. If we're looking for somebody to add to the team from a scientific perspective, we want them to have deep scientific experience in a field where their experience could be applied to our work.

What we want is a passion for women's health and an individual who realizes there's a huge opportunity here to make an impact. That's core. And then just making sure that they understand that we're going to be spending a lot of time together and we're going to have some tough conversations. We're going to have high highs and we're going to have low lows because that's just the nature of being in a startup. So, feeling like there's a fit for someone within our organization is key.

It is about cultural fit. We're a weird group of people to all put together in one spot. People must appreciate that difference and recognize that one of the things that we value most is diversity in thought and diversity in perspective. 

Out of all your experiences and past job positions, which one do you think was the most influential in propelling you to start your startup?

 There are two moments. One is during undergrad at UT, I was an entrepreneurship undergrad, and I had a fantastic professor, Dr. Anita Leffel. She's so amazing and she drilled into us over and over and over again that as entrepreneurs, your job is to spot problems and figure out how big those problems are, and then you can go about solving them. Usually, the person closest to the problem is the best suited to solve it. That spoke to me because I then invented a medical device around my labor and delivery experience with my first daughter.

And that experience showed me that I don't have to be a doctor to have a really good idea for something in medicine. I don't have to be a Ph. D. to have an interesting perspective on why we aren't looking at X, Y, Z. 

My second moment was in the first job I had working for a venture fund and my primary role was doing due diligence on companies seeking funding. Having the opportunity to look at that and say, okay, my job is to find holes in this. It's to be able to find the holes to say, are these holes a place where we can add value? And are we okay with these gaps? Because every company has gaps. The second that a company can go out to raise money, it's about knowing where you need the help, who you're raising money from, and if they can help you fill those gaps.

The healthcare and biotech industries can be very competitive and complicated. What do you think is Hera Biotech’s distinguishing factor that allowed the business to establish itself in such a competitive market?

Unfortunately, anybody focused on women's health is not operating in the same sort of competitive environment that traditional biotech or traditional therapeutics are operating in.

So that's unfortunate because I'd love to see it be extremely competitive. The other thing that I think is quite special about the women's health space is that most companies in the startup phase of women's health are female founders and female CEOs are probably the most supportive and collaborative group of any that I've ever encountered.

We are all trying to help each other. For example, when we are told “no” for an investment, I immediately say, tell me exactly what you're looking for, what fits in your thesis, and what kind of company? I will send that to about 10 or 15 of my colleagues who are raising for that, we take the approach that rising tides raise all ships.

Very few problems in women's health are extremely competitive. So, there may be a lot of companies in fertility, but some are addressing sperm quality issues, some are addressing motility, and some are addressing embryo transfer; so even within the same vein of industry, you have so many facets to the problem that very few people are going after.

Women's health has a unique position for some awesome roll-ups. You've seen it in the fertility clinic space, but I think that you're going to start to see it in the startup and innovation space as well. 

What was the greatest challenge or difficulty you encountered when researching and deciding what technologies to include in your diagnostics tests? 

When I founded Hera, I wanted to do a women's health company that was looking at diagnostics. There wasn't a lot of diagnostic technology out there, a symptom of the state of maturity of this market.

But specifically for Hera’s technology, endometriosis is very personal to me. My sister had a hysterectomy at 32 to solve it, which didn’t fix many issues and she still struggles today. I have a niece struggling. The bench science that went into validating the hypothesis of why this tissue type, or why this gene set, was critical because a lot of what I see, especially in the endometriosis space, is a fishing expedition approach.

Someone just rounds up a bunch of markers out there that we think probably have something to do with endometriosis and then statistically we just correlate that back to a diagnosis. Well, we don’t believe that’s the best approach. You should start with what are the main drivers of the disease itself and can we find underlying causative markers to look at.

So that's one of the things that I think sets HERA apart in the competitive landscape of endometriosis. There's a lot of noise in it right now, so it's about making our voice heard over the noise.

What is your main tip for aspiring entrepreneurs to stay up to date on the newest, most cutting-edge technologies and products?

Yes, so if you're in women's health, you should be listening to Femtech Focus. It's a fantastic podcast by Dr. Brittany Barreto, who's a PhD geneticist, and she has incredible companies and founders that she interviews. If you're looking at other aspects of the life science industry, find your industry-specific groups on LinkedIn and then I would find your industry-specific publications.

In my opinion, it's important early on to stratify the quality of the information. Peer review is king. It doesn't mean that innovative technologies aren't going to have some publications that aren't peer-reviewed early on. But start with peer-reviewed and then you can work down to just, industry publications, press releases, articles, or interviews.

QUICK TAKES 

What are the three most important qualities of an entrepreneur?

Grit is number one, patience is number two, and a sense of urgency is number three. 

Who's a female entrepreneur you admire? 

Julia Cheek, EverlyWell Health. She is my girl crush. I mean, she's just incredible. She was convincing people of how important transparency and access to lab testing was before anybody else was and she's bossed it out on Shark Tank.

I heard you used to rodeo. How do you spend your free time now?

For fun, I will read, cook, garden, or run. We have three daughters and four dogs as well. So, I enjoy spending time with the dogs and with the fam.