Meet Spencer Matonis, CEO & Co-Founder of Edulis Therapeutics, "the next big thing in GI care" - one of the VentureBridge 2025 Cohort Companies

June 27th, 2025 - Steven Guo

Carnegie Mellon University’s VentureBridge program, an initiative of the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, supports CMU-alumni founded companies with capital, co-working space, access to mentorship and resources, and investor demo days across San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and New York City.

In this spotlight series, we take a behind the scenes look at an interview with Spencer Matonis of Edulis Therapeutics at the beginning of the VentureBridge program in May. The interview below is slightly edited for clarity.

Q: Let's dive in. Edulis Therapeutics' one liner is “Edulis has developed the first drug delivery implant system for patients with chronic GI (gastrointestinal) diseases. Tell us why this is novel or different... Why does this matter?

Spencer Matonis: Whenever you hear me pitch, you’ve heard me say that Crohn's disease is growing in prevalence. It's gone up more than 50% in the last 20 years, and right now, 80% of those patients are undergoing surgery at some point in their patient journey to manage their stubborn symptoms in the gut. And so in particular cases, like stricturing Crohn's, these are localized kind of pockets of stubborn inflammation that don't necessarily respond terribly well to systemic delivery methods. That's like the biological injections, biological infusions, oral treatments, kind of the whole standard of care currently in Crohn's therapeutics.

And so my PhD thesis was related to GI devices, and basically medical devices in the GI tract, and kind of using the GI tract as a portal for new methods of Internal Medicine. And when I started customer discovery in that area, Crohn's disease kind of came up as a hot spot of pain points and patient anxiety and kind of clinician dissatisfaction. That's how I met my clinical co-founder, Vlad, who was at Washington University-St. Louis at the time as a third year GI fellow. He joined me in the customer discovery journey through the regional, national I-Corps programs in 2022 understanding what kind of difference we can make in the treatment field.

Neither of us are microbiologists inventing the next billion-dollar Pfizer drug – I think they have this outgunned there. So I think it came towards applying my experience from my PhD research at CMU, my background in materials science and Vlad 's background in endoscopic treatment of Crohn's to come up with this novel solution that basically focuses on delivering existing drugs in a new way to make them safer and more effective for patients. Specifically, one of the interesting observations we made was that these patients are getting routine endoscopies and colonoscopies every six to twelve months. So if you're a CD patient or you're an IBD patient – anybody with chronic GI –  it's heavily relying on the scope to monitor their condition and to evaluate new changes in medication.

Basically, it's the number one tool for any GI doctor. It's kind of the most sophisticated and ubiquitous tool out there. And when you look at the standard of care and the different therapeutic treatment methods, really none of them use the scope for drug administration. So that was one unique insight that we had. And another thing is that these symptoms weren't really responding to the systemic drugs. You even see a lot of side effects come up, even for biologics after ten years of use – or steroids, famously after a few months of use. Basically the drug kind of concentrates in the body where you don't want it.

And the question was… “well, couldn't we - what if we could just put the drug exactly where we wanted it and keep it there and minimize systemic exposure?” So that's when we started focusing on a localized drug delivery method that used the scope and used that kind of regular, sticky cadence with patients to maybe administer better care specifically for these Crohn’s disease sub populations that had this very high surgery rate. So yeah, that's kind of how we started boring out the concept for Edulis, had another clinician join the team, and we started prototyping, and effectively used my Carnegie Mellon experience and exposure to an incubator (Project Olympus), to build this idea out.

Q: Diving a bit more about your team. You had mentioned that your team’s superpower is that you  have a startup PhD with two young, committed, and accomplished GI physicians, which you said you think is a very rare combo. Tell us more about why you think that’s rare and how it really sets you apart?

Spencer Matonis: There aren't many material science entrepreneurs. There's not enough, at least in my opinion, anyway, and not too many that are able to find themselves paired with active GI doctors – or doctors in general – especially out of CMU. And I think on a broader level, that's something I would like to work on and improve. There was an initiative at the time that I pitched CMU basically trying to do a rotational program, getting CMU engineers into the University of Pittsburgh’s healthcare environment. Ultimately, it didn't happen because of my bandwidth. But basically, I mean CMU engineers, like, there are a lot of CMU engineers who, I believe, want to do non-robotics and non-defense applications. They may have an interest in healthcare and biotech, but they don't really have that exposure. And it's really hard to come up with a great healthcare idea if you never have a chance to talk to a patient, right? That should be a red flag.

It's really hard to… you can't really speculate and hypothesize what is going to be meaningful to a patient – or doctor, unless you have direct first hand access. So that's what Vlad and JP give me as active clinicians. But also the typical pairing is that you go and find a notable physician, and typically they're in their 50s or 60s and they're not looking to be hands-on in a startup. It feels like it's not their blood passion, which is fair, but it means that it's hard to find a dedicated clinical co-founder. So with Vlad and JP… JP had just become an attending interventional endoscopist and then Vlad was in his third year GI fellowship coming back to Pittsburgh preparing to get hired for a UPMC job he now has.

So I called them right at the burgeoning of their full-time clinician career, where they've been through intense residencies, they've been through intense fellowships, through intense internships. They are fully trained, fully vetted, and seen a ton of patients. They've been involved in clinical trials. They've tested new technologies. So they aren't just active MD students, these are full fledged experienced physicians, but they're also 32 years old. So they're still young. They're still early in their lives and early on in their career. And very rarely do you see young physicians who have the time, the energy and the willingness to get involved with the startup at this stage. And what that means is, like, they're literally flying into Nashville for animal testing and sleeping on my couch, for instance. There's just not many doctors that are willing to do that.

I think there's only a handful of companies in the country that are working on startups around the country dedicated to Crohn's disease, and I think even less of them that have a material science plus physician background. And it's a combination of me going out there and doing a lot of customer discovery. And I guess you need to recognize, like, as a material science or as an engineer looking to do something in GI, I knew immediately that I needed to find a physician to work with. So that was a big focus in my early team building. It was like, “I'm not really gonna, pick a solution until I validate the problem with the physician.” And I think the timing was really great, interacting with these two. It was both great timing paired with their willingness to be involved.

Additionally, they're actually legitimately excited about entrepreneurship. They're not just doing it for their CV. They're not doing it for the money. So I see it as a rare combo considering engineers and physicians don't have enough interaction with one another. These pools do not cross as much as they should. MIT and Harvard have a very unique partnership, and I think that makes them a super strong powerhouse in this area, Stanford as well, with their Stanford Medical System. But at Carnegie Mellon, it's something that we don't necessarily have and I hope that I can prove that we should facilitate more of those partnerships and interactions.

Q: Why is this so important to you? What drives you to solve this problem in Crohn's disease and do this venture?

Spencer Matonis: I think people expect me to say, “oh, my sister had Crohn's growing up, and it devastated me…” but to be honest, it started with knowing I wanted to solve a problem with societal benefit. So for me personally, it was basically looking at Green Tech or Health Tech for the solution verticals. I had come off of a fresh experience working with wearable electronics and wearable bio sensors and platforms from NASA before CMU and then my PhD research was focused on gut medical devices, and that was a totally blue ocean space. I kind of saw the shortcomings of skin-based wearables, and they're really convenient, and they're really good for academic papers, because you can slap them on your skin and could measure cortisol, you know. So while it's great for academic papers and great for convenience, there's a limitation on the utility of just being on the skin and kind of the noise that comes from that and things of that nature.

Whereas with the gut, you have this topological continuation of the skin, but you're getting close to all this good stuff. You're getting close to all these major organs. There's a ton of nerves down there. Hormone regulation goes on, immune system regulation goes on, your sleep schedule, your metabolism, all these major, major things are homeostatic pathways influenced by the gut. So that's where I saw this unique blue ocean opportunity to like, “okay, there's not many people building in this space in particular not many startups working in GI and on GI devices.”

That wide open space to work in attracted me, and then from there, I did plenty of customer discovery. And while I conducted customer discovery, talking to those doctors and patients had built my empathy for the patient’s story. So again, it wasn't as binary as, “oh, I grew up watching somebody with Crohn's, and so now I've just always wanted to solve it.” It really started with my passion about the GI space coinciding with my eagerness to find a problem with societal benefit. And after hearing 50 different stories, and talking to crying mothers about their experience with Crohn's first hand… I mean, very organically, over the course of a year, I built up a very compelling and empathetic understanding of what these patients are going through and how big of a problem it is.

And to that point, it also helps – as I pitch constantly and talk to a lot of people – that almost every time I talk about what I'm working on, somebody in the room says, “Oh, this is so great. My sister has Crohn's or my cousin has it and it's terrible and they just had surgery or had major side effects.” By putting myself out there and continuing to talk to people, I've gotten continued reassurance that this is a big problem and it's a meaningful problem. It hits close to home for a lot of people. And like I said, I think talking to a lot of patients and doctors has helped me build empathy for this population I’m solving for.

So my biggest goal with this company is to get to talk to the first patient treated with our system who can give a positive review and say, “this changed my life. This was a huge boost to my standard of care.” That is probably that's my number one success point with Edulis, and that's something you don't really get normally. As an engineer, that patient interaction of, “hey, I tried your tool, and it made a huge difference for my life, and it was a massive improvement to my past regimens…” I think that'd be an extremely magical and fulfilling moment. I also believe that if we make a difference in patient lives then money won't be an issue. This is a substantial market. And there's big competitors, but we’ll be fine – I've no doubt about that. But I think that patient feedback is something super cool that even with climate tech for example, you might not necessarily get that benefit of, “you helped my life in a direct way.” With climate somewhat relying on ten, twenty, even thirty-year visions, or something like your fusion technology, space technology might take a long time to see the ultimate vision. And not that clinical trials are short, but it's a very personal feedback system, and it's a very personal and kind of fulfilling way to see how your blood, sweat, and tears in entrepreneurship has impacted someone’s life in a very meaningful way. 

Q: Tying back to a little bit of what you said about your goal or success metric… What is the North Star for Edulis?

Spencer Matonis: The end goal is we want to show clinical efficacy. That is the end all be all for my world. Everything is all talk, really, until you show clinical efficacy in humans, and you get to have that interaction. We're not starting from total ground zero, because we're not building a new drug from, from the atom up, but this is a novel treatment. So for us, it's our improved concept testing of like, “okay, we're trying to put this filamentous drug depot, into this very specific tissue layer with a proprietary syringe? Can we put a blank depot – non drug payload – in that environment for a day?” “Okay, yeah, we did that. We can see on X-ray that this depot is still there. Now let's try for 30 days. Okay, now let's try for 72 days, and let's have a drug in the depot this time.” And so it's really been this incremental escalation of goals to just try and get to this end vision of one year sustained release, localized delivery of a Crohn's disease relevant therapeutic. But testing is long. It's not quick.There's not really a quick and dirty way to do this. We're using expensive, large animal models. Testing takes a while. It's not your typical startup.

Q: Where does the name Edulis Therapeutics come from?

Spencer Matonis: I wanted a cool name, but I wanted it to resonate with our gut approach and like building GI devices, particularly bioresorbable GI devices considering my background in biomaterials at Carnegie Mellon – and “Edulis” is Latin for edible. So I thought this was a unique name, memorable, and it also taps into our focus on GI and particularly bioresorbable devices and platforms that don't require retrieval. So it simply goes in through the mouth or goes in through the scope, and your body can consume it naturally. We're not going back in. We're not putting staples in, we're not putting a metal stent in. This is designed to be absorbed and consumed by your body and in a relatively natural, harmless way.

And so for patients, the biggest thing is “out of sight, out of mind.” You don't have to do anything. You don’t have to remember to take a pill. You don't have to go to the hospital to get an injection or an infusion. Hopefully, you don't have to get surgery either. Or maybe instead of five surgeries, you only maybe end up having one. We can hold off surgery as long as possible, because our technology and our material is being reabsorbed by the body and releasing drug based on that mechanism. I think that’s core to our patient centric approach.

Q: Tell me more about your experience as a full-time entrepreneur after completing your PhD?

Spencer Matonis: I think there is value in highlighting that there are some days that I don't have anything to do. I think that it's 1) it's hard if you're a startup person, and you just want to go, go, go. I think it's hard to grapple that. And then also 2) with social media, on LinkedIn, it's all about hustle. It's all about short term weekly goals, daily goals… breaking it up by month-by-month revenue and user retention. But I think it's important, especially with hard tech entrepreneurs and PhD spin outs, to understand that sometimes you're not going to have those quick KPIs to kind of validate yourself. And especially with longer experiments and stuff like that, I think it's okay, and you shouldn't feel bad about yourself.

Sometimes the magic is made in time, and not everyone is patient enough to tackle some of the longer term stuff. So your resiliency and your patience and your mindfulness and the sense of just sitting in the problem and being uncomfortable during a really long test and then having to, you know, if it, when it goes wrong, inevitably, you go, “okay, well, before I spend another three months on a test, I'm going to be extra thorough in my prep work basically, and try to ‘dot every i and cross every t’ to make sure that this is a high value experiment, that I'm getting the most possible data from it.” So it's a different dynamic than a software company or maybe a robotics company when you're working with live animals, or you have very long testing periods, and especially if you've just gone full time for a PhD – it can be unnerving. Like, as a PhD student, I can work on my thesis, I can work on side projects. I can work on company stuff. There are things you can work on and if something doesn't go well, oh, I can get validation there. 

Those are things that can boost your self esteem and boost your motivation. But going full time and having this be all I'm going to work on... sometimes things are slow. It can be a little bit uncomfortable, but value is made in the discomfort, and later on you're going to be rewarded because not many people and other companies are going to want to spend the time that you did to get there. And as an entrepreneur, you're kind of making your leap of faith to say, “I'm going to sit here in this uncomfortable area and grind it out.”

Q: Going back to what we were saying about how hard tech and life science companies typically have a long timeline to market… what keeps you going when you hit challenging periods or when things get really tough for you?

Spencer Matonis: Yeah, I mean, there's times I'll come away from conversations with people I really respect, and I'm not sure if we're doing the right approach. Maybe we should completely change it – I don't know. And there's definitely plenty of self doubt. However, I think that the team aspect that I mentioned and the patient feedback aspect I mentioned are probably the biggest boosts. So like I said, the value in putting yourself out there – if you can, if you're not stealth – talking to people about the problem you're working on, and letting them talk as they want to share their human connection to what you're working on. Whenever someone says, “oh wow, this is something I really need. Or, oh my God, can my sister be part of your clinical trials?” We're not there yet, but that sentiment is very heartwarming, and I know it comes from an authentic place and that provides you with a boost when times are tough. And then, like I said, just trying to trust my gut that our unique team as a differentiator is substantial. I believe in our team and it’s because it's not just one clinician that's part time. It's two clinicians giving a big chunk of their schedule to this. It's having an engineer full time. Pair that with a validated problem and a substantial market size, it brings together all the right ingredients.

So I think I have faith that the solution will come and the right solution will come, whether it's what we're working on today or tomorrow or in a year. I mean, when we, when we pitched at McGinnis and we got second place, that was with this, like semi flared, squishy stent concept. But where we're at now, it was the same value proposition and same goals of “okay, we want to put a drug in the intestine for a long period of time, and we want it to allude locally to the tissue. The form factor for that was totally different. You know, multiple centimeters of this flared stent, little tube thing. We're like, “we don't know how exactly we're going to stick this thing into the gut on the scope, but we'll figure it out.” And over time with iteration, we developed this different technology where now it's a little angel hair piece of pasta going through this special syringe and stuff like that. That's a whole nother dimension to the product that came about.

But with our application and what we think is the unique value proposition, which is this long therapeutic window with an endoscopic treatment. We've been pretty confident in that approach. And sure our drug payload may change, but like I said, I think the more important parts of the business are validated, we have a great team, we’re working on a real problem, and it’s a huge market. So again, I think as long as we stay alive, we'll find the solution.

Q: How can the community support you? What's your call to action?

Spencer Matonis: If you're an alumni with a connection to IBD who wants to see better solutions on the market, more creative solutions, and really something that is a patient-friendly form of drug administration, trying to solve like the most stubborn of symptoms with a long therapeutic window – meaning you put it in once a year and you forget about it. You don't have any maintenance, no shots, no infusions, no surgery.

If you're an alumni that's invested in IBD solutions, give us a call and think about being an angel investor. And I mean, other than that, if you have biotech or pharma experience, that’s relevant to us, we’re always looking for advisors. If you've helped bring products through the FDA or if you've worked with combinatory devices, we're interested in your input and mentorship. But yeah, it's a tough fundraising market out there, especially for biotech and life sciences, and the seed stage that we're in is a valley of death for companies. You're kind of really on your own and it's kind of up to you to cultivate and leverage a community of invested individuals to really get your first couple million in this field, frankly, before the big boys even consider you.

Startups are kind of on their own, especially in this economy. So if you want to see this thing happen… reach out and invest basically, because this is where most companies die, unfortunately, especially, especially with the SBIR fallout and the recent cuts to a lot of health care funding. And it’s not just Edulis, go support life science startups, because it's going to be a tough year ahead.

Thank you to Spencer Matonis for the conversation. We welcome you to follow, invest, and champion Edulis Therapeutics as they move forward. Come and see them pitch in-person at our upcoming CMU VentureBridge 2025 Demo Days in Pittsburgh (September 24th) and San Francisco (October 8th)!