Tara Dalton could have driven into the sunset after selling Stokes Bio, her life sciences and diagnostic company, for $44 million (€33 million) in 2010. She and business partner Mark Davies were reported to have netted more than €11 million between them.
Instead, Dalton is now heading up Altratech, a Cork company which last month closed a €5 million fundraising round and is looking to become a leading provider in virus diagnosis.
After spending two years working with Life Technologies, the biotech multinational that snapped up Stokes Bio before it had made any sales, Dalton lectured at University of Limerick.
When she was approached by Niall Olden of Kernel Capital about heading up Altratech in 2016, she was intrigued by the company’s research. “I really liked the technology. It had a novelty in that it combines chemistry and engineering,” she said.
Olden and Dalton knew one another from the Stokes Bio days. Kernel Capital backed the company in its first venture capital fund, which invested €19 million in various companies and returned €42 million. Two of the fund’s strongest performers were Stokes Bio and Tim Cummins’s ChipSensors, which sold in 2010 to Silicon Labs for €10 million.
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Cummins went on to set up Altratech with Brian O’Farrell of University College Cork in late 2013, and had received seed funding from Kernel Capital and Cyril McGuire’s Infinity Capital. Olden thought Dalton would be a perfect fit for the start-up.
Dalton did her first degree in aeronautical engineering before switching to biomedical engineering for her post-doctorate. While she refers to the technology as next-generation molecular detection, it is effectively an alternative to polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which is used to make multiple copies of a segment of DNA.
“PCR is a laboratory technique that is extremely powerful but it has limitations. We want to do the next generation. Our technology can look at any molecule, not just DNA and RNA [ribonucleic acid]. For me, the most powerful aspect of the technology is that we can take it outside the clinic and democratise it,” she said.
Unlike existing technology, Altratech uses synthetic chemistry that allows it to take samples only from saliva for respiratory infection diagnoses.
The company employs 20 people, mostly scientists and engineers, and last year was granted a series of patents from the US and Europe. More patents are pending for China, Japan, Europe and the US.
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While Altratech was not ready to commercialise its product when Covid-19 hit, Dalton believes its use will extend beyond the pandemic.
“I will never again have to explain to an investor the market opportunity for this product,” she said.
