When heart disease claimed the life of her father years ago in their homeland of Istanbul, Turkey, Ayla Annac, his eldest child, was immediately thrust into the role of family provider in a culture where women were not typically groomed to be breadwinners. She was in her last year of college at the time and vowed never again to feel as helpless.
“I thought there was nothing I could do to help my father live. There was no heart for him at the time [for a transplant].” Other options were either too expensive or unavailable. While she’d always been interested in medicine, she said she never could have predicted what the future held in store for her in the United States.
“They don’t have part-time jobs in Turkey,” she said. ”You go to the university and your family supports you. You finish and you get a job, or get married. Now it’s different. Things have changed.”
Annac, a former ballerina, is the president, CEO, and co-founder of InvivoSciences, LLC (IVS) in Madison, a biotech company testing the effects of drugs on reconstituted human tissue, particularly heart tissue. On a personal level, the role affords her the opportunity to help save others with critical diagnoses, such as the cardiac disease that took her father. “That is why I do what I’m doing,” she said. “Not because of the title.”
She moved to the United States on her own in 1993 to continue her higher education and built a résumé working with Fortune 500 companies, including Procter & Gamble. She earned an MBA from St. Louis University in marketing and entrepreneurship and a Wharton continued education certificate in biotech finance before co-founding InvivoSciences with Dr. Tetsuro Wakatsuki and Dr. Elliot Elson in St. Louis in 2001. “I’ve never done this alone,” she insisted. “We share everything. They’re the scientists. I’m the business one.”
A year later, the company moved to Madison because, as she noted, the city (and WARF in particular) was known for its welcoming culture and supportive funding environment for biotechnology startups.
Today, InvivoSciences develops and supplies 3-D cell cultures for research that mimic the functions of living organisms, particularly those of animals and humans. “Technologies can allow us to use cells in a urine sample and grow your tissue,” Annac explains. “We don’t have to work with controversial embryonic stem cells or cloning. We can predict potential effects of the drugs on you in a small tissue model.
“If I wanted to see a human reaction to an asthma drug, for example, I’d grow your tissue in a dish. You don’t have to take the drug to see if it causes cardio toxicity (heart attacks) after using it for six months or a year.”
(Continued)
Â
Annac said the company’s goal is to extend life without risk and make drugs safer for a patient’s cardiac function. “We can also minimize the use of animals in drug discovery research,” she said. “We can grow the disease-composed tissues on a dish for them to test and copy from the patient with a significantly reduced cost. This is very important technology.” And it affords her a constant connection to her father.
While pharmaceutical companies have not widely accepted the IVS technology yet, Annac is hopeful that within two years the company’s research will become more mainstream. “One day, maybe the pharmaceutical companies will adopt this. I will be much more happy,” she said.
Not surprisingly, funding is always a challenge, as is learning how to promote the company without a promotion budget. “For a woman, access to funding is probably tougher, I think, because I haven’t seen a lot of women leading venture capital groups. Now, when they see a woman coming, they’ll see an obstacle with motherhood and children.” Annac, the mother of two, has allayed those concerns with a successful 13-year run at IVS.
Annac is a fierce advocate for human and animal rights, and when she’s not working with breakthrough technology, she also enjoys salsa and merengue dancing with Wakatsuki, now her partner in life and love. She practices yoga and enjoys sailing, and is comforted in her belief that her father is watching her progress through the biotechnology field, particularly where it relates to heart disease. “We have to take risks,” she noted. “Every day is a gift.”
Click here to sign up for the free IB ezine – your twice-weekly resource for local business news, analysis, voices, and the names you need to know. If you are not already a subscriber to In Business magazine, be sure to sign up for our monthly print edition here.
