Photo: Catalysts

Lisa Ann Cooper founded Catalysts back in 2011 and is a major success story that is now taking an exciting digital and commercial turn.

Cooper has a background in diversity and diversity management and wanted to work with social entrepreneurship. She established Catalysts with a view to preventing minority youths from dropping out of upper secondary school and thereby out of society when their journey had barely begun.

– We established a mentoring programme to achieve our goal. The pilot conducted back in 2011 included four young people from Somalia and four business leaders. I was amazed by the results from both groups, says Cooper.

After that, things really got going. Today, Catalysts has six employees in Oslo and Bergen, and shortly also in Skien. This means they have a presence in five of the country’s 18 counties. Since 2015, 277 young people have taken part in the mentoring programmes. The evaluations show that all of the young people had better self-esteem after the programme and were more hopeful about the future.

Catalysts Technologies – third-generation CSR

By chance, Cooper heard about a digital tool called ReConnect developed by the Center for Shared Decision Making and Collaborative Care Research at Oslo University Hospital. In short, ReConnect is a web-based communication tool where patients, in this case people with mental health problems, can connect with health personnel, with other patients via a café forum, and add information about how they perceive their own state of health, among other things.

– I understood at once that this could be an important tool in our mentoring programme in Catalysts, but it also has much greater potential. We are working on developing a research-based digital platform to strengthen relations between people for use by other customers and in other industries, says Cooper.

She describes Catalysts Technologies, which is the name of the digital commercially-run organisation, as a third-generation CSR tool, where the product itself contributes to a better society.

– CSR 1.0 was about setting corporate social responsibility targets, CSR 2.0 about implementing these targets, while CSR 3.0 is concerned with developing products that are socially responsible in their own right, says Cooper.

Along with her employees, she is well under way with further developing the digital communication tool, and a couple of municipalities have already shown an interest in buying it to use in their work with vulnerable groups.

– The potential and scope of use is vast. Just think about how many lonely people there are in our society. According to Statistics Norway’s living conditions survey, loneliness is a growing problem among young and old alike. This is a tool that can help individuals to become acquainted with each other, thereby giving them a better life by strengthening their relations and subsequently their health, says Cooper.

Research from institutions including the University of Minnesota, which Catalysts quotes in its Impact Report 2017, supports this: Good, healthy relationships are an essential part of health and self-esteem. Having strong relationships contributes to people living long, healthy and happy lives.

Looking forward to further cooperation with Inven2

The first investors will soon be finalised in Catalysts Technologies, and Inven2 is already in place as the very first.

– The fact that Inven2 were our very first investor is important to us and gives us credibility in the work with investors and customers going forward, says Cooper.

She praises the collaboration with Ivar Bergland, who is Technology Strategy Manager and Cooper’s contact person at Inven2.

– I’m looking forward to our further cooperation with Inven2. They are experts in commercialisation in this field and have been a good sparring partner when discussing alternative business models. I look forward to receiving more good advice going forward. We have everything we need to succeed, says Cooper.

Ivar Bergland at Inven2, on his part, is equally pleased about the collaboration on developing Catalysts Technologies.

– Catalysts Technologies is a groundbreaking project that is different to our usual projects in Inven2. I’m very glad that we can take part in it, because this is the future. Cooper and her colleagues developing a simple digital tool that can be directly used to resolve major social issues on several levels has enormous potential, including internationally, says Bergland.

*Ivar Bergland has left Inven2 and now works with innovation at the Research Administration Office at the University of Oslo.

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Photo: Meshcrafts

Back in 2013, the company focused on developing sockets used for charging electric cars and providing power to marinas.

– After a time, however, we saw that the most important element was management and switched our focus to this in 2016. Now, we can manage as good as all smart chargers on the market and are among the European forefront of these solutions, says Myhre.

This saw the start of the platform and app SmartCharge, which is currently used to operate and manage over a thousand charging stations in housing cooperatives, parking companies and municipalities.

The right price with differentiated electricity

The SmartCharge app makes it easy for you as an electric car owner to find an available charging station near your location, book it and charge there, and not least, you make simple payments via the app and at the right price.

– SmartCharge calculates the price you pay to charge your car based on power consumption and electricity prices, says Myhre. This is in contrast to other systems where you pay for the time the car is connected to the charger, regardless of how much you have charged.

– Our solution is also state-of-the-art in terms of power management when charging electric cars. Norwegians are not that aware of their energy consumption since electricity is cheap. So far, for example, we haven’t had differentiated electricity prices at different times of day. We think this will be introduced around 2020, and it will then become important to plan when you are going to charge, as well as when to shower or use your washing machine, dryer and dishwasher. In short, it will mean keeping track of your power consumption and optimising it on a 24-hour basis to minimise costs, says Myhre.

The Germans have an awareness of electricity prices already since they have had differentiated prices for a number of years. Germany is also the market that is expected to have the fastest growth in the use of electric cars. This is why the company now wants to place major focus on the German market, and is on the lookout for investors in order to enter the international market.

Facts Meshcrafts:

Product: SmartCharge Platform and App for power management and electric car charging: Used by over 1,500 private customers and manages over 1,000 charging stations for housing cooperatives/municipalities

Office: StartupLab

Stems from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU)

Won Inven2Start in 2013, and has won a number of other awards

Website: www.meshcrafts.com

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Foto:

– The principle behind our technology means that we have the potential to develop therapeutic vaccines against most serious illnesses, but we are concentrating on cancer, says Agnete Brunsvik Fredriksen. She is co-entrepreneur behind Vaccibody and currently acting as both president and head of research. The CEO is Martin Bonde, a Dane with extensive experience from the international biotech industry.

The technology on which Vaccibody is based is a design that enables vaccines to target the right antigen-presenting cell, which then activates the immune system so that cancer cells and viruses are effectively eliminated.

The company is based on Fredriksen’s PhD project conducted with professors Bjarne Bogen and Inger Sandlie.

World leader in neo-antigens

Brunsvik Fredriksen says that the company now has a leading position in a new field that is based on using neo-antigens to develop therapeutic cancer vaccines tailored to the individual patient.

– Neo-antigens are new antigens that form when the cancer develops. They are specific to each of us. Our technology enables us to develop these effective vaccines in a cost-efficient way, says Fredriksen.

The first trials with the personalised vaccine started in 2018. More than ten patients are currently included in the trial, which aims for a total of around 40 patients. The patients suffer from different forms of cancer including melanoma, non-small cell lung cancer and kidney cancer.

In addition, the first trial in which the vaccine is used against the HPV virus in women, which is a precursor to cervical cancer, is still running. The trial is now in phase II and the results of a six-month interim reading of the data appear very promising.

New clinical collaboration

The icing on the cake in 2018 is Vaccibody’s new clinical collaboration with the American company Nektar Therapeutics. The company is estimated to be worth around seven billion dollars, and it signed an exciting agreement with the global pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) in February 2018.

A clinical study will test the combination of Vaccibody’s vaccine with Nektar’s immunostimulant NKTR-214. NKTR-214 has the ability to dramatically increase the number of T cells, enabling them to eliminate cancer cells, at the same time as the vaccine is able to help the body to make the right cancer-specific T cells.

– We are delighted to have entered into this collaboration with Nektar Therapeutics. The pre-clinical trials using NKTR-214 in combination with Vaccibody’s neo-antigen vaccine produced very promising results. We look forward to evaluating this combination in a clinical trial, says Bonde.

Stems from immunological research at UiO

Vaccibody is located in Oslo Science Park, where the company shares a lab with Nextera, another company that is the product of research conducted at the University of Oslo.

The chief scientific officers of Vaccibody and Nextera both completed their doctoral degrees in the field of immunology under the supervision of professors Inger Sandlie and Bjarne Bogen, and have chosen to commercialise their research.

Vaccibody has received major attention in 2018, in both Norwegian and international media. Among others, the Norwegian newspaper VG wrote a long story on the company, which was included on the front page.

Listen to an interview with CEO Martin Bonde in the podcast Radium from November 2018.

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