UA Startup Founder Ellen Brune Up for Global Women’s Award

Ellen Brune

University of Arkansas researcher and startup founder Ellen Brune is a global finalist for the Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards, the university announced Wednesday.

Brune, 28, founded Innovate Arkansas client firm Boston Mountain Biotech to produce pharmaceutical proteins using a method she helped develop at the UA. She is one of 18 women in the world selected as finalists for the awards.

The Cartier Women’s Initiative is an international business plan competition created in 2006 to identify, support and encourage projects by women entrepreneurs, according to a UA news release. Brune, 28, is one of two women from the United States up for a Cartier award. She will compete in France in October for a prize package that includes $20,000 and a year of coaching in business development and marketing.

Brune earned a doctorate in chemical engineering with a focus in bioprocessing from the UA in 2013. She founded Boston Mountain Biotech after helping develop a patented method to simplify the production of pharmaceutical proteins used in drugs that treat a variety of diseases and health conditions.

“I am very excited to be named a finalist for the Cartier Women’s Initiative Award and to showcase my business at the fantastic venue in France this fall,” Brune said.

Boston Mountain Biotech, located inside the Genesis Technology Incubator client at the UA’s Arkansas Research and Technology Park – holds the exclusive license to market the trademarked Lotus purification platform it has developed.

Brune created a series of custom strains of the bacteria Escherichia coli that produce minimized sets of contaminants or “nuisance” proteins, simplifying the purification process on the front end of protein pharmaceutical production, according to the release.

“It can cost half a billion to $1 billion in 10 years for pharmaceutical manufacturers to deliver a protein therapeutic from a lab to the manufacturing stage,” Brune said. “Our company uses genetic engineering to make the purification process more efficient. We’re trying to help large pharmaceutical companies get their drugs to market cheaper and faster.”

Boston Mountain Biotech has received more than $1 million in research grants through the National Science Foundation and Arkansas Biosciences Institute and won more than $43,000 as a UA graduate-level, business-plan team in international competitions.

“The Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards are much more than a competition,” said Stanislas de Quercize, CEO of Cartier, in the release. “Every day these women rise to the challenge of matching social impact with economic value, and initiatives like this are essential to share new models and build responsible businesses. There is something very special about a community of driven women entrepreneurs federating these values.”