Diverge TSL: Healthcare Startup Success

There is a concentrated effort in the city to expand and develop the healthcare startup ecosystem. Programs like AMPDNR, Bridge to Cures, and the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Therapeutic Accelerator Program all serve to foster healthcare innovations and convert discoveries into viable businesses.

Diverge Translations Science Laboratory is an excellent example of a medical technology startup thriving in Milwaukee. Cofounders Dr. Mike Lawlor and Dr. Julie Tetzlaff started their lab at the Medical College of Wisconsin and spun the work off into a rapidly growing business. Located in the Global Water Center, the bootstrapped business had 10 employees and is currently expanding both its technical staff and the size of its laboratory.

CEO Lawlor and COO Tetzlaff spoke with MKEStartup.News to discuss their growing company.

MSUN: What does Diverge Translation Science Laboratory do?

Dr. Lawlor: I’m a pathologist and scientist. Pathology in general is really getting tissue specimens and then turning them into experimental results. Usually, it’s deciding what’s wrong with it. We’re in this age where people have molecular therapies that they’re trying, like gene therapy, it’s now possible to also watch the structures climb their way back towards normal.

This is a skill set that nobody has developed because these treatments have only been around for the last decade or so and they’ve been slowly getting developed. We’ve actually participated in a lot of that work at the animal stage and then transitioning it to humans.

That allowed us to get a lot of unique expertise in the lab and in terms of evaluating things. That’s been an increasing need because there’s more of these types of therapies that are being developed. Some of them are now approved. In this field, it’s really necessary when you’re doing something like this to make sure the gene therapy agent actually gets to your target tissue and then does something useful. That’s what we’re completely centered around.

Then there’s still a lot of regulatory requirements and quality requirements that are necessary to be sure that you’re producing the best quality of data possible, and that the FDA will respect it. That requires a very focused infrastructure and we’ve developed that over the years.
We had started at the Medical College of Wisconsin and then became our own business. In focusing that way, that’s really allowed us to be a boutique vendor that provides really specialized services in these areas. That’s allowed us to grow even more. We’re working with more companies and more diseases and ideally making more of an impact.

MSUN: How do the companies who need these testing services find you?

Dr. Tetzlaff: Dr. Lawlor is the world expert in this type of diagnostic and clinical trial development, so a lot of our work has been all word of mouth. For example, when he was at MCW, he had a half-dozen clients working with him, and now we’ve quadrupled that without trying, without any customer acquisition efforts, just word of mouth, which has been fantastic!

MSUN: Why did you choose to keep your international business in Milwaukee?

Dr. Tetzlaff: Because we can do things remotely, we are allowed to stay in a city that we love, that we both grew up in and the majority of our employees are also from Wisconsin.

Dr. Lawlor: The people that work for us are the commodity that we were trying to retain and that’s part of why we needed to go off on our own was to make sure that we were doing everything at an industry standard in terms of compensation, career paths, and things like that. We have the best people on the planet for generating this kind of data. They all live in Milwaukee, and they don’t want to move.

This is a unique opportunity to have really high-quality technical staff and retain them. This wouldn’t be possible in Boston or San Diego because there’s a feeding frenzy for technical staff. There are so many opportunities, and so many companies. But Milwaukee people like to stay in Milwaukee.

Dr. Tetzlaff: We both lived in Boston for a time, and we’ve seen that ecosystem and how well-developed it is, but to be able to do it here in Milwaukee with the quality of people we have here, it’s just been wonderful.

MSUN: Did staying in Milwaukee present the company with any challenges?

Dr. Tetzlaff: We love it here and we were just really grateful to have found a space for our lab, which was challenging.

Dr. Lawlor: There were only really three places in Milwaukee that had appropriate space for a lab and a lot of were incubator spaces. We were moving as a 10-person company, not as a two-person company. There’s just no way we could have put a 10-person company into that space, and that’s not the intention of those spaces.

At the Global Water Center there was a lab space already here, and we needed to move into something that already had ventilation so we could put our fume hoods in. That kind of space for the footprint of a small to mid-size company just didn’t exist in Milwaukee.

MSUN: Your bootstrapped company is in growth mode. What is next for Diverge TSL?

Dr. Lawlor: We need to maintain a level of quality as we expand. Part of the goal here was to take the people who have devoted the best years of their lives to working for us and then giving them a future. The long-term goal was to make as much of an impact as possible and then spread out. It’s happening a little faster than we were expecting. We are expanding the team and trying to be as thoughtful as possible about how to continue giving people challenges without anybody being overwhelmed and maintaining our quality.
I think we have the potential to do a great deal of good and that would be amazing to do that with a part of our career.

To learn more about Diverge Translational Science Laboratory, connecting with the growing company here.