A lot has changed inside the labs of the St. Louis-based startup Varro Life Sciences. In just a handful of months, its space inside the Cortex Innovation District, at 20 South Sarah Street, has gone from mostly empty lab benches to a more vibrant biomedical development space. Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe will be in town this morning to cut the ribbon on that headquarters and R&D laboratory.
Just as importantly, there are more people. Varro CEO Tom Cirrito says the company has hired a half-dozen people already this year, and has more open positions it’s looking to fill.
Keep up with local business news and trends
Subscribe to the St. Louis Business newsletter to get the latest insights sent to your inbox every morning.
And there’s new equipment, typical items like pipettes and centrifuges, as well as new machinery, such as laser cutters and a laser welder, and, toward the back of the lab, the now completed “clean room,” where the company intends to manufacture the core part of its pathogen detecting products, what Cirrito calls a “micro-immunoelectrode.”
“That room has an extraordinary series of filtration units and air temperature controls,” he says. “It’s essentially going to be a semiconductor manufacturing facility, what we call a foundry.”
Cirrito explains the micro-immunoelectrodes are a type of tiny bio-sensor (slightly larger than the chip on your credit or debit card) that can be produced and programmed to detect any kind of pathogen. For Varro, the focus is on making sensors that can detect Influenza A and B, RSV, and COVID-19 for the two breath-based diagnostic products it’s currently developing.
But Cirrito says those four viruses just scratch the surface of what Varro’s core technology can potentially detect: bacteria (strep or staphylococcus), fungi (aspergillus or Candida), and others, things even Cirrito hasn’t thought of.
He admits there’s too much for Varro to try and do itself as a small company, so instead Varro is focusing on one application and making everything about its products and how they work open source—meaning the company is actively giving away its innovation for free and encouraging people to engage with it.
“When you have a technology that’s powerful, it’s wrong not to enable other people to innovate,” Cirrito says. “It would be absolute arrogance for us to assume that we know everything you can possibly do with this technology.”
But getting to the point where many people are using and building off of Varro’s technology isn’t as simple as just publishing a few schematics online and hoping people pick it up. “If you put something up online and nobody goes to see it, what’s the point of putting it up online at all, right?” Cirrito says. “Being open source isn’t enough, you need to make sure the rest of the world knows that.”
It’s why Varro brought on Addie Cobb, a multi-decade veteran of developing open source communities, to be the architect of the company’s global open source ecosystem.
“The messy piece of open source is the human aspect of it,” she says. “It’s not the technology. It’s the relationship between individuals that builds and strengthens the community.”
A lot of that starts with building a clear understanding of the problem that a piece of technology can solve. Cobb says that’s pretty easy to do in Varro’s case, since we all just lived through a global pandemic where diagnostic tests to detect infections had slow results and were arduous to take.
“Everyone around the globe understands on a personal level because of what has happened with COVID recently,” she says.
Then it becomes about creating spaces where people interested in developing off of Varro’s technology can gather and share ideas and feedback, something all open source ecosystems have, Cobb says. The company now has a landing page on the popular software repository platform GitHub and is in the process of creating a community on the instant messaging app Discord, where they can organize informational calls or help facilitate conversations between people interested in working with Varro’s IP, she explains.
Varro has also been attending conferences on open source hardware development to explain what it’s doing, and staffers were even present at this year’s United Nations health assembly, which draws health ministers from across the globe, to share more about the potential applications of its innovation, says Cirrito.
“There was a real enthusiasm for being able to take this new technology that can change so many aspects of the delivery of care, make it faster, cheaper, while also improving health care for patients,” he says.
Says Cobb, “I’ve not met a single person who wasn’t like, ‘That is the coolest thing I’ve ever heard. That’s just amazing.’”
Part of the enthusiasm is because what Varro is attempting to do has never been done, in commercializing university-owned intellectual property (the core of Varro’s technology was developed at WashU) in a way that isn’t proprietary. Open source practices have been around in the software and even some hardware development spaces for years, but not in the life sciences, she says.
“There’s a lot of distrust and confusion around health,” she says. “Varro is blazing a trail to try and drive trust and transparency into an industry that has not had those practices because it’s not open. They’re by and large proprietary.”
Varro has pledged not to legally enforce the patents it holds, and has employed a multi-tiered licensing approach, where its software components are licensed under the GNU General Public License, and hardware designs, schematics, and documentation are covered by the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0.
Broadly speaking, these licensing approaches fall on the “copyleft” side of open source development, where people can use the technology so long as whatever they produce with it is similarly free of restrictions, says Aaron Williamson, an attorney working on open source software and hardware-related issues since 2008.
“It has this kind of ideological underpinning,” he says. “The idea is, ‘I don’t believe it’s right for you to restrict the freedom of your users, and so therefore I’m going to limit your freedom to use my software for purposes that are proprietary or restrictive.’”
Williamson notes that while software is an established space for open source principles, open source hardware, like what Varro is developing, has traditionally fallen into more of a “hobbyist or niche space,” with less uptake in their respective industries at large. “Open source is not a business model,” he says. “Open source can contribute to a business model. It is a strategy that can, if deployed strategically, help drive adoption [or] create trust.”
Fundamentally, Williamson says a company developing an open source product needs a way to ensure its customers come back and pay them, whether through support services, subscriptions, custom development around the product, or other strategies.
“There’s not a single path that you can pick,” he says. “It’s always going to be specific to your industry and company.”
Cirrito admits the path Varro is on initially made him skeptical. His team only started considering it when a potential investment from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin was on the line. The company eventually landed the $20 million in non-dilutive capital, which came with the mandate to be open source.
“I had a lot of learning to do. My whole team did,” Cirrito says. “We as a company basically went through every element of our business plan, every cell of our financial model, line by line, probably 10 times over, in order to understand just how this would benefit us.”
He’s now convinced the business model will work. When someone develops a new device, the hope is they’ll come back to ask Varro to both develop and manufacture the micro-immunoelectrodes they need, all because Varro has built an ecosystem around its technology.
“That’ll be a volume business. Margins will be lower, but we’ll be selling hopefully many more [micro-immunoelectrodes] and we’ll have a large catalog of [them],” he says. “Our manufacturing capacity is essentially infinite. There’s no reason why we as a company can’t manufacture enough [micro-immunoelectrodes] to supply the entire globe. That’s one of the great features of semiconductor manufacturing technologies.”
