Why a St. Louis startup is giving away its pandemic-thwarting idea

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Recall how long it took, in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, to screen yourself with the gold-standard method, the PCR test: You’d swab your nostrils, hand the swab to the person at the pharmacy or clinic, then wait while they sent it off to a lab for processing. Yes, the result was highly reliable, but it took days.  

The St. Louis biotech startup Varro Life Sciences has developed a biosensor that’s of comparable sensitivity but takes only 60 seconds to deliver results. And it can detect more than just the next coronavirus: The company estimates that within a few weeks of the emergence of any airborne virus, bacterium, or fungal pathogen—say, the latest flu or strep—the company will be able to make a biosensor that can recognize it. 

Imagine the uses. The ability to intervene, in real time, when a sick person is about to walk into a crowded plane, military base, school, or hospital. The ability for a pharmacist to screen an infected but asymptomatic person, who can then be given medicine before they even start feeling crummy. The ability, in the gravest scenarios, to know when to clear a building. Varro has pondered these uses and come up with two devices in which to deploy its sensor: an air-quality monitor, to be used in open spaces, and a kazoo-like breath test, which anyone could administer with little to no expertise.  But rather than dream up every other possible use, Varro will leave the dreaming to the rest of the world by making its three technologies open-source—a sort of philanthropic business model.  

“There’s not a lot of precedent for this in biotech,” says Varro’s CEO, Tom Cirrito. His brother, John Cirrito, a neurology professor at Wash U. School of Medicine, developed the technology in collaboration with two colleagues—Carla Yuede in psychiatry and Rajan Chakrabarty at the engineering school. They’ve received a combined $8.4 million in federal grants and $3.6 million from the philanthropic group Flu Lab, which is reportedly funded by Google co-founder Larry Page and his wife, Lucinda Southworth. As is customary in university tech-transfer deals, WashU has retained ownership of the intellectual property, but in this case, it licensed it to Varro in a way that allowed for open-source. 

Varro is doing this because it accepted $20 million in non-dilutive financial support from Vitalik Buterin, co-inventor of the cryptocurrency Ethereum. He conditioned the funds on Varro’s adoption of such a business model. Buterin believes in decentralized pandemic preparedness, and this capital infusion (which has already been converted to dollars) came through Buterin’s charitable fund, Kanro. The concept of free and open-source hardware had already been on Varro’s radar, says Tom Cirrito, but Buterin’s group persuaded the company of the model’s logic. And, Cirrito quips, “$20 million is great motivation.” 

The philanthropic logic is that the public health systems in the developing world can use all the help they can get, and free IP certainly qualifies. The commercial logic is that, despite the IP being available to all, Varro plans to become the “provider of choice” for its biosensor (or “micro-immunoelectrode”). That technology is the sine qua non of its air quality monitor, its breath test, and other yet-to-be-invented devices. Unlike the breath test, which was initially 3D printed in the Cirrito Lab at WashU and could be replicated without too much trouble, the biosensor is the hard part. Nobody has “cracked the code,” according to Tom Cirrito, on commercially manufacturing such a product in a way that’s both high-quality and cost-effective. “We’ve been at this for a while,” he says, “and we still haven’t perfected it.” 

But if Varro does perfect it, the demand for it will, in theory, be boosted by the technology’s open-source availability. People may invent a breath test that’s superior to Varro’s, for example, but they’ll still need the biosensor for it to work. Says Varro’s CEO: “We’re giving people the opportunity to create markets that we couldn’t even think of, and then we’re saying, Oh and by the way, we’re making biosensors, and it’s a lot easier and cheaper for you to buy them from us than it is to make them on your own.”

Such a scenario would be a win-win for Varro and the developing world, but there would also be a third winner here: St. Louis. Cirrito says that Varro is planning to build a biosensor facility here in town—most likely in the Cortex district.  

John Cirrito says it makes the most logistic sense. “We need to transfer all the knowledge from our labs into the company,” he says. “And it’s not just me, Carla, and Rajan that need to do this: It’s our staff and students. So proximity is really important.”

None of which is to imply that St. Louis has everything Varro needs. One missing piece, says Tom Cirrito, is a deep pool of experienced managers and entrepreneurs—those who’ve taken more than one company from early stage to exit. “You always hear about the 18-year-old who made a new app in his parents’ basement,” he says. “Life sciences doesn’t work that way. It’s multidisciplinary as a feature and it requires experience. So yes, I’ll be hiring a lot of young people, but I also need people who’ve been around the block a few times, people who aren’t just thinking What’s the most exciting next step for my career? but What’s the most exciting next step for my family? St. Louis is really attractive for that. I’m excited to be able to be part of bringing that to St. Louis.”