Oramed Pharmaceuticals

Ndave Kydron came from a business background—a lawyer with an MBA—but his mother was a scientist who had been working on a specific problem for decades: how to deliver insulin orally instead of through injections. In 2006, she approached him with a breakthrough. She had developed technology that could protect insulin from degradation in the stomach and allow it to pass intact into the liver, the organ that naturally regulates insulin secretion. The potential was massive: almost 10% of the population suffers from diabetes, and the shift from injections to oral delivery would fundamentally change patient experience and compliance.

Kydron worked with the medical center's tech transfer office to license the intellectual property out and started the company in 2006. The technology works by using an "anti-enzyme shield" that protects insulin from the digestive enzymes that would normally break it down. Instead of insulin going straight into the bloodstream (as with injections), oral insulin delivery sends it to the liver first, where it can work more physiologically. The core innovation was the protective mechanism—similar to an M&M shell—that keeps the insulin intact through the digestive tract.

Raising capital for a pre-revenue pharmaceutical company was challenging. Traditional venture investors are uncomfortable with the 15-16 year development timeline and $1 billion average cost to bring a drug to market. Kydron made the unconventional decision to take Oramed public on NASDAQ in 2013, seven years after founding. This gave early investors liquidity while the company continued through FDA trials. The strategy worked: in December 2015, a major Chinese pharmaceutical firm became their first major customer through a private placement, investing $12 million in equity and paying $38 million for exclusive licensing rights in China.

The Chinese partnership validated the technology's potential—they valued the company at approximately $1 billion based on the deal structure. However, the public markets were slower to react, possibly due to bias against China-derived investments and low liquidity in the stock. Kydron noted that while the company was trading around $5 per share, the Chinese partner paid $10.50 per share, creating a disconnect. The illiquidity meant larger institutional investors couldn't enter without dramatically moving the stock price. By Kydron's account, the company is roughly "half private"—public in structure but with concentrated ownership limiting trading volume.

As of the interview, Oramed had raised over $100 million in total capital (including the Chinese deal) and maintained approximately $50 million in cash on the balance sheet. The company was proceeding through FDA Phase 3 trials, with a major 90-day trial expected to produce results within 10 months. The Chinese FDA process was expected to move faster. Kydron remained cautiously optimistic but clear-eyed: pharma is binary—either the drug gets approved and becomes a major success, or it fails. There's rarely a middle ground of steady moderate revenue. The company was also developing a pipeline beyond insulin, including GLP-1 analogs for weight loss and leptin treatments, and partnering with major pharmaceutical companies to apply their delivery technology to other drugs.