Cate Dyer founded StemExpress in 2010 and is CEO of the Folsombased biotechnology company , which procures biospecimens for research and development , clinical trials , and commercial use . The company collects both healthy and diseased samples from human bone marrow , umbilical cord blood , stem cells , biopsy tumors and other sources , which it then supplies to researchers and clinicians working to develop tests , new drugs , diagnostic devices and more to treat and cure diseases . StemExpress has a network of health care partnerships with hospitals and systems in both the United States and Europe . The company also has seven cellular clinics in the U . S . to collect blood , cells and tissue from patients and donors . The Sacramento Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce named Dyer its 2021 Businesswoman of the Year . Comstock ’ s spoke to Dyer about her company ’ s function as an accelerator of medical advancement .
How did you get into this line of work , and why is this work important to you ? I was premed through school . I actually started working in Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital in the emergency room , and thought I would be an emergency room physician . I started working … with the transplant teams that would come in to do organ collection for transplantation . I realized , at the time , that the majority of us have pink dots on our ( driver ’ s ) license that say we want to be a donor . ( It ’ s ) about 80 percent of Californians . But the sad fact is that by the time someone gets to a place in their life where they are passing away , usually there ’ s enough restrictive issues that less than 2 percent of people actually qualify . The reason could be that they recently had cancer , or the reason they ’ re passing away is something that ’ s a disease-based situation , and so that stops the collection of healthy tissues used for transplantation .
What dawned on me is it ’ s just a gigantic missing link in this — the majority of what takes people ’ s life is disease , and the issues with not being able to collect transplant material because of disease ( creates ) this big black hole where nothing is really being collected then that supports disease research . … When I was working in the emergency room , I knew , for example , breast cancer researchers that were waiting for breast biopsy samples from rare forms of cancer , but if somebody passed away from a rare form of cancer , there was no method to collect those biopsy samples to send those to research institutes that were studying those diseases .
When I first started dreaming up how to solve that problem ( I ) was thinking … how could we focus on disease-based tissues or blood samples , etc ., in a way that helped speed up the time it would take for disease researchers to do their work and ultimately get better cures , drugs , devices to market faster . When we first started the company , right away , we started with a handful of companies that , for example , were going to collect a specific type of blood from disease patients , and they knew how hard it was to get those samples . It was going to take them six years to collect enough samples to show their work to the ( Food and Drug Administration ) to get approved for their blood tests . We were able to work with that company and get it down to under three years by just mass collecting in a space across multiple spectrums , hospitals , clinics and so on to actually speed that time frame up .
StemExpress is a big accelerator . When I think about R & D work , when I think about clinical trials , the companies and the entities doing this work , that ’ s one of the biggest hurdles they have . If you ’ re creating a device and you want to get it approved by the FDA , and that device is meant to work on all general population of patients , the FDA is going to have you do thousands ( of ), if not 60,000 , different test cases — different ethnicities , different genders , different ages — to show that machine is relevant and works correctly across that whole spectrum . If you ’ re creating a machine just for cancer patients , they ’ re going to have to limit that scope to a smaller number of samples , but you still have to show it on all different forms of cancer , different criteria , different gender and ages . What really slows down the success of things coming to market is this collection period . For us , as patients out in the world , when we ’ re expecting that cutting-edge technology to come , the fact that it takes so long to deliver those things , to get to good requirements , to ultimately produce a good product was where I saw the biggest frustration and felt like StemExpress could play a crucial role to help speed up those time frames and ultimately allow these companies to get to market faster with their cures , drugs , devices , etc .
You started the company with $ 9,000 . Do you now have outside investors ? If not , why has it been important to keep the company independent ? We have no outside investors ; it ’ s all grown organically within the company . … We purposely kept really outside investors out . With most outside investment companies , they usually have a 2-3-year turnaround until they ’ re out , and the next group is in , be it an IPO , be it another round of seed money or private equity . Most of those groups want to sell to the highest bidders . … In our world , that would be pharmaceutical companies . If we ’ re supporting five major pharmaceutical companies to get their successful product ( to market ) as fast as possible , there ’ s an easy interest that one of those pharma companies could want to buy us so we can ’ t support the others . We ’ ve seen this from day one . I have lots of pharma companies interested in acquiring Stem- Express because they see us as the engine to help bring things to market . … Our mission is to support patients . It ’ s not to
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