In this episode of Raising Biotech, Surani speaks with CEO and co-founder Jack O'Meara of Ochre Bio, a company dedicated to tackling the large and unsolved problem of complex and chronic liver diseases. Founded in 2019, Ochre raised an impressive $30 million after only three years in start-up mode and is now gearing up to take some of its drug candidates into the clinic.Surani speaks to Jack about his individual journey and the moment he met and decided to partner up with co-founder Dr Quin Wills. Jack discusses their light bulb idea of setting up a company to study the liver and develop novel and targeted gene therapies using human donor organs as preclinical models instead of mice. Jack talks about Ochre's fundraising journey in Europe vs US, his own experiences raising funds as a relatively young biotech founder and how the company successfully set up an organ "ICU" to conduct its research.Dr Scott Friedman, Dean of therapeutic discovery and Chief of the division of liver diseases at the Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai, joins the podcast to share his thoughts on Ochre's thesis and mission with siRNA gene therapies and its "deep phenotyping" approach. With 40 years of experience in the field, he's seen a lot of failure, so discusses what types of challenges Ochre will have to think about as they progress into human testing.Jack discusses next steps as the company moves towards the clinic -- which involves partnership talks, a Series B fundraising and narrowing down the first indication to test its medicines.Timestamps:For any comments, questions, feedback or suggestions you can connect directly with Surani Fernando on LinkedIn or email: [email protected]Music composed by: Yrii Semchyshyn (Coma Media) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.