one to watch
‘We don’t just hand clients a recipe for a catalyst; we partner with them to produce the chemicals and the end drugs. This is a longer term process before we will receive a royalty’
Smurfit Graduate Business School, which ran a scheme called the Hatchery that was set up to help MBA grad- uates start businesses. “Jonathan Mills took an interest and he paired us up with Pierce Cole, an MBA who helped us revise the business plan,” Kelly says. He was still living with his parents and teaching music in order to make a living.
Eureka moment Then came a real Eureka moment which gave the com- pany the momentum it needed. “We were sitting in Luton, coming from Switzerland, waiting for a flight, when we realised that we needed some intellectual prop- erty so we licensed an IP for a catalyst from UCD,” Kelly recalls. “This gave the company a recognised patent plus the plan to research and develop others.” Throughout 2002 Kelly continued to engage with ven-
ture capital companies with little success until he addressed a conference in early 2003 in the Burlington Hotel. He was approached afterwards by Denis Jennings, founder of Fourth Level Ventures, who expressed an interest in the start-up. In February 2004, Celtic agreed a €700,000 funding package with Fourth Level Ventures and Enterprise Ireland came in with €250,000 to get them going. Celtic took on Brian Elliott as part-time CEO and hired two full-time chemists to develop the technology licensed from UCD. “We hit all the milestones, and in 2006 we raised €1m
in Business Expansion Scheme funding through our own contacts. We also recruited Geoffrey Fuller who had huge experience, having built and sold his own business. He came out of semi-retirement to run our labs and we continued to hit all the technical milestones,” Kelly explains. Fuller brought new impetus to the team and towards
the end of 2006, Celtic won its first contract from a major pharmaceutical company to carry out lab con- tracts at UCD. “Our business model evolved. There is not much money to be made from selling catalysts so we worked on building up relationships with the fine chem- ical and pharma companies through doing service con- tracts. These companies need to trust your technical ability and your security. “I shadowed Brian Elliott and then became CEO. We
were doing well on service contracts, which made up most of our turnover in 2008/09. Since then we have developed a range of products to sell,” Kelly says.
32 Irish Director Summer 2011 The Celtic CEO explains that the company uses cata-
lysts to make key chemical-enabling technology to cre- ate chemicals, many of which end up in important drugs.
UK facility However, licensing catalysts to a fine chemical company would not maximise the added value Kelly wanted. “We looked all over Ireland to see if we could manu- facture catalysts ourselves but there just wasn’t enough wet lab space. After looking at quite a few sites in the UK, we decided to go with a former ICI manufacturing facility inWilton nearMiddlesborough because it had all the licences and permits.We were manufacturing within three weeks of going there.” Wilton gives Celtic Catalysts a facility to show its
customers. “We don’t just hand clients a recipe for a cat- alyst; we partner with them to produce the chemicals and the end drugs. This is a longer-term process before we will receive a royalty,” Kelly explains. Celtic will only receive a royalty when all clinical trials are passed. Significantly most of Celtic Catalysts’ clients are based
in the UK, Switzerland, US, Germany and Scandanavia. “What happens in Ireland is that the large pharma com- panies manufacture the drugs which are developed else- where,” he says. Celtic Catalysts now has five patents in its stable and
turnover is today in seven figures. It deals with all of the top 10 pharma companies in the world, and catalysts it has developed are in use as building blocks for a treat- ment for Parkinson’s and another for rheumatoid arthritis. The company specialises in chiral catalysts which are
used in the manufacture of 40pc of all drugs on the mar- ket. Kelly explains that chiral catalysts act on the chem- ical reaction to produce the drugs you want. Chemical reactions normally produce good and bad drugs, which means half of the results must be destroyed. Chiral cat- alysts can be used to stimulate the production of the good drug thus minimising waste. According to Kelly, the company has raised €3.5m to
date and plans to raise another €750,000 this year to fund expansion through sales offices in the US and con- tinental Europe. And the future? “We have had expressions of interest
from fine chemical companies who want to engage in development, which would result in them taking us over, but we are not interested,” he stresses. “We want to remain an Irish company.”
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72