MSU Research Foundation Podcast
The MSU Research Foundation Podcast takes you behind the scenes of research and entrepreneurship within Michigan State University's ecosystem. Discover how ideas create impact, with stories from dedicated researchers, ambitious entrepreneurs, and the innovators shaping Michigan's future. From breakthrough discoveries to startup journeys, explore how the MSU Research Foundation helps fuel innovation and economic growth across the state.
MSU Research Foundation Podcast
Advancing Precision Medicine with Mike Klein
In this episode, we talk with Mike Klein, CEO of Genomenon, a genomics intelligence company helping researchers and clinicians make sense of vast amounts of genetic data. Mike shares his journey from electrical engineering to leading a genomics startup, discussing how Genomenon’s AI-driven platform, Mastermind, is accelerating precision medicine by making genomic information actionable.
We explore how Genomenon’s technology is used by healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies worldwide, the company’s evolution amid the AI revolution, and how their work has directly impacted patient lives. Mike also reflects on Michigan’s growing startup ecosystem, the role of early-stage investment, and the collaborative support from both Michigan State University and the University of Michigan in scaling the company.
Host: David Washburn
Guest: Mike Klein, CEO of Genomenon
Producers: Jenna McNamara and Doug Snitgen
Music: "Devil on Your Shoulder" by Will Harrison, licensed via Epidemic Sound
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This conversation was with Mike Klein, who is the CEO of a company called Genomenon. Genomenon is a genomics intelligence company that was formed about 11 years ago based on some technology created out of the University of Michigan. We are a co-investor with U of M and many others on this really important company who's doing really important work in the genomics marketplace and helping diagnose genomic abnormalities and helping sort of practicers of precision medicine do their work. I think you'll find this a really compelling and interesting story, and we're just so excited to be a part of it.
David Washburn:Today I'm with Mike Klein. Mike is the CEO of a startup company that's now 11 years old called Genomenon GGenomenon. Genomenon is a genomic intelligence company that was formed about 11 years ago and created from intellectual property that was created at the University of Michigan, and so Mike is going to tell us about what all this means, what the mission of the company is, their products and their users, and how they have evolved in the sort of AI revolution that's underway right now
David Washburn:. So, in full disclosure, the MSU Research Foundation, through our captive venture funds Red Cedar Ventures and Michigan Rise, are both investors Genomenon Genominon, and before I introduce Mike, I'm going to tell you Genomenon Genominon was named a best places to work by Genome Web, a leading industry newsletter covering the genomics marketplace, and they've also won more awards than we have time to mention here, but they're related to their spot in the industry, their products and their services and the impact they've had within the state of Michigan and the team that they have built. , I this think, is is a testament to Mike's leadership, the team they've built and the culture of innovation. And so I say all this to introduce Mike, because he probably won't bring this part up
David Washburn:himself.
David Washburn:So welcome Mike. Thanks, dave, good to see you. Let's start with you personally. You know, I said all that at the beginning because you've been very successful in your career and I just wanted you to sort of introduce yourself. Maybe take us back to undergrad days. You're sort of finishing up. What was your path out of undergrad, what did you study and how did you sort of find your way to Genominon today?
Mike Klein:Well, it's a long path, Dave, but I started when I was an undergrad. I was a computer engineering major so got my degree bachelor's in computer engineering on my way into corporate America. So the first company I worked for was Motorola Semiconductor. So I worked in the semiconductor world. We got to Arizona. Actually, while I was doing that, working in a strategic marketing group, I was also going to school at night in Arizona State to get my master's in electrical engineering.
Mike Klein:was to be a researcher. I really wanted to be, really get my PhD and go off and do a lot of work around just the science of computing. And over time I really started leaning more into really. development. I ended up moving to another company called Rockwell Automation where I got more on the product development side and over time got the bug to really kind of go off and do it myself. So I ended up going about halfway through my MBA program at the University of Michigan, wrote a business plan and decided, ok, I'm going to quit my job and start the company, and this was back in 1993. Wow, and so I started my first company called Steeple Chase Software in 93. We sold that to a multibillion dollar French conglomerate in 2000. Did two other companies? Ran two other companies along the way before I got introduced into Genomino Got it and Steeplechase was based in Ann Arbor.
Mike Klein:Wow. It was. It was. It was a factory automation software company. So, playing off that field where I was in at that point in time, was factory automation really taking off-the-shelf computers to run factory lines by doing that with a software solution? Wow.
David Washburn:So electrical engineer doing factory automation and software, and now you're sort of in the genomics business. Quite a leap. How did you connect into Mark Keel's work at U of M?
Mike Klein:So after I left my last company, online Tech, which we grew from I don't know, $2 million to $20 million, I was looking for kind of a place to kind of slow down a little bit and take a look at a broader landscape. I joined the Innovation Partnerships as a mentor in residence. So as a mentor in residence, you're an experienced entrepreneur. You're helping at about a dozen Dave portfolio companies. So these were professors or students that wanted to spin out university technology, to start a new company. Genominon was not one of my portfolio companies, but that was the way that we actually met, because Genominon was a spin-out of University of Michigan. Mark, who was the founder, was the CEO, but he was looking for a more experienced CEO to take the company to the next level, and so he approached me.
Mike Klein:I really wasn't looking to new startup again. Genomenon I mean, going from zero to a million dollars is a lot harder than going from $2 million to $20 million. So I was looking for a more mature company that had good product market fit that we could really just I could leverage my experience in the software and the IT space to grow. But I have to tell you, dave, I just fell in love with the mission. I mean the idea of.
Mike Klein:I could barely spell DNA when I got when I joined Genominon but the ability to leverage the knowledge of genetics, both in the world of genetic diseases but also in cancer, to improve patient outcomes was really compelling. My mother died of breast cancer 30 years ago and back in those days there was no such thing as precision medicine. It was just everybody got treatment number one. If treatment number one failed they went to treatment number two and if you were lucky you could get to treatment number three. And the promise of precision medicine, of really understanding the DNA makeup of cancer and be able to dial in the precision medicine that can really extend you know, either eradicate the cancer or extend patients' lives dramatically was a pretty compelling personal mission that got me hooked into the company.
David Washburn:I think you said mission, the mission, but maybe you could repeat that the mission doing, the company. I think you said leveraging the genomic information to save lives, if I heard that correctly.
Mike Klein:Yeah, so our mission kind of the way that we really define what we're doing is making genomic information actionable to save and improve lives. So that includes, you know, working with genetic testing labs that are helping diagnose babies born with rare diseases, that are helping make informed treatment decisions for cancer patients, but also working with pharma companies that are pharma and biopharma companies that are developing precision medicines around those diseases.
David Washburn:Thank you. You just went to my next question. So the customer uses and the customer sort of profile. I think what I heard was sort of clinical diagnosis and precision therapeutics practitioners. and ..
Mike Klein:Yeah, we work with about over 200, about 250 different with, labs or healthcare providers that are implementing next generation sequencing to do genetic diagnosis or cancer diagnosis, and that is a footprint that goes actually all around the world. So we have customers in Korea and Australia and, uh, in Western Europe, in South America, obviously in the U? S, and then we have about two dozen pharma customers and biopharma customers that we're working with as well.
David Washburn:That's fantastic, and and so those customers that you're Genomenon with they're um, they're getting a subscription to a web-based software platform called Mastermind. Is that correct? it
Mike Klein:That's correct. So a good way to think about Genominon is we're at the heart of what we are as a data company. So ? a data We deliver that through software as a service, like Mastermind, or another product line that we acquired just recently called the Cancer Knowledge Base another product line that we acquired just recently called the Cancer Knowledge Base or we license that data straight up to companies that want to build that right into their workflow to accelerate their diagnosis or use that in drug development. We also do deliver that in the form of services. So we'll take our unique data sets and we'll do specific analysis that pharma companies want to get a better understanding of. You know the disease trajectory or the genetics of a disease, and so I call that taking the data and wrapping with love so that they can really understand what that data means.
David Washburn:Right. So is it a software subscription model and then the services are sort of things that they can bundle on if they choose to. Is that kind of the model?
Mike Klein:Yeah, so they can license IP can ask us to do project around Mark data, to basically give them answers instead of a bunch of data Fantastic.
David Washburn:the . The ip that came Mark is mastermind the original ip that came out of the, the university that mark Mike started to build? M
Mike Klein:it is. It is the problem that um, that mark was trying to solve, and when I first met him he's like hey, mike, here's all the years of school I went to to get my md, my phd, and you know he was a fellow as a moll. He said I'm spending 50 hours a week doing Google searches, trying to find papers that have the same variants that I'm seeing in these cancer patients to be able to make a diagnosis, and so I've got to go in. There's hundreds of ways that authors can describe variants and dozens of ways they can describe genes, and there's a lot of other conflicting information that's out there, so it's really difficult to go out to Google, find every paper that's out there. Make sure you got to read the paper.
Mike Klein:What he really wanted was to build a technology and a platform that would bring that information out and try to search through this and read through the articles, and so that's essentially it was cool what we did. The core technology that was licensed from the University of Michigan was the early AI that we used, which we call genomic language processing, so the ability to go off and normalize the hundreds of ways authors can describe variants and then find all that information across the full text of you know it's over 10 million full text articles, so every piece of scientific research that has genetic data in there we've been able to index and build into our search engine so we can take our users directly to the papers that have the information that they need on their patient's variants.
David Washburn:Especially it sounds like you were a little bit ahead of the AI curve. That sort of that. We can't. We can't go anywhere today without hearing about AI, and maybe you all were doing it before.
Mike Klein:It was cool especially with the new generative AI large language models that are out there, and we're leveraging that, so we're now able to do things there, pull this information apart. Now, with some of the modern AI generative AI tools, we're able to just accelerate the work that we're doing in finding better connections across the journals and the articles, that we're doing in finding, you know, better connections across the journals and the articles that are out there, being able to curate this information so that we're providing answers, not just pointing to articles.
David Washburn:Tell me more about the company. How many kind of employees do you have? I think you said you have about 200 plus customers. How many folks work there? Customers how many folks work there we get about 100 and 150 employees across Chennarman and how many based in Michigan versus the rest of the world?
Mike Klein:Before COVID we started with about 15 employees in Michigan. We still have about 15 employees in Michigan. A lot of the growth, as we recognized we needed to go remote. It opened up a workforce that actually went across the US and then about two years ago we acquired a company that was based in Bosnia. It was called Boston Genetics but we have 80 employees in Bosnia right now, really well-trained set of genetic scientists that do a lot of our curation work and a lot of our client-facing work.
David Washburn:Are any sort of marquee customers that you could talk about, or maybe case studies? Could you give us a case study on a marquee customer and what they're doing and how it had impact?
Mike Klein:Sure, sure. So you know we've got kind of a who's who when it comes to genetic testing. So when you think about St Jude's Children's Hospital or Mayo Clinic or Ambry or Myriad, you know on the genetic testing lab side are all leveraging our platforms and leveraging our data for diagnosis. I think some of the really compelling stories are really getting down when you're able to find how the work that we do touches a patient's life. And I'll give you an example. This is in our very early days but it's still kind of a really kind of moving story that we still celebrate on a regular basis At Genomemon.
Mike Klein:This is a story about a three-day-old baby who was having a dozen life-threatening seizures every day. They brought him into the NICU. This is at Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego. Rady is one of the leaders in using next-generation sequencing to help diagnose babies that are born with rare diseases that they really can't diagnose any other way. So they brought the baby into the NICU. They decided they were going to do rapid whole genome sequencing, which means they have the sequencing data within 24 hours. They sequenced this baby.
Mike Klein:This is a very early day, so Mastermind was out there,. but they had gone through and looked at all their standard databases. They did Google searches. mean, couldn't find anything on the patient's variants. They then went in and about, put the variants earlier into Mastermind able to identify one paper that that patient's variants believe, there, and that variant suggested a nutritional defect one, was tied to seizures. When they supplemented the baby's diet, Genomenon seizure stopped. And now this boy's name is Fritz and he's a healthy four-year-old, four-year-old or maybe five years old now, a uh living in san programs, diego. I think he's living in Mintz, diego and in. really well. Because, you know, we're not are doing the treatment, we're not ones making the treatment decisions, we're not even the ones doing the research. We're the company that helps put that research at the fingertips of the doctors that are making critical diagnostic decisions. And in this case we were able to uncover a piece of information that helped quite literally save that baby boy's life.
David Washburn:That's a just what an impact there Incredible. And finding that one paper using the sort of tools that you have, I mean critical, absolutely critical. One of the things that I'm really excited about Genomenon mentioned earlier that we you know we've invested some money into the Genominon company. I also believe I'd have to check my data on this one. I know the University of Michigan is also an investor in Genominon and I think, if I'm not mistaken, it might be the first startup company that both Michigan State University Research Foundation and U of M investment programs I think it might be through Mintz have invested in, and so I think that's really compelling. As much as you know, we have rivalries on athletic fields, but I think this sort of transcends that. When I hear stories like the one you just told me, it makes it so exciting to work in collaboration with you all and U of M and the other investors to help sort of provide the fuel to have this happen. Yeah, I think we're really Dave.
Mike Klein:I think we're really fortunate to have an incredible ecosystem in here in Michigan and have the ability to you know the funding sources that are available in early stages because you know you invested in Genomino when we were in our very early stages as a seed investment and I think maybe our Series A investment round where the company was still trying to determine, get its feet underneath it, get its about prove that we had good product market fit and the ecosystem that we're talking about and you know the ecosystem that we're talking about both you know with the way that the Michigan ecosystem has evolved. .
Mike Klein:You know, 30 years ago when I started my first company, there was nothing like this around. We had three venture capitalists in Ann Arbor and that was it and you know you really I raised $10 million, but it was Genomenon of the angel funding Arbor, Michigan 30 years ago for my first startup. And here now we've got an ecosystem that really helps us put that collaboration in place. It's not by University of Michigan or Michigan State. It's really about how do we support these fledgling young companies that really need that support to help build and get those very early stages of product market fit in place where they can go out and then get you know growth funding for the later stages of growth for the company Well, and shout out to our colleague, my colleague and our friend, Jeff Wesley, who leads both Michigan Rise and Red Cedar Ventures on our behalf at the foundation.
David Washburn:Thanks much Dave joining us been a today. guest today has been Mike Klein. So much for joining us today. My guest today has been Mike Klein. Mike is the CEO of a genomics information company called Genominon, based in Ann Arbor.
Mike Klein:Michigan, mike. Thank you, thanks, dave, it's a pleasure you.
