Andrew Rothaus (left) and Abraar Karan won this year’s Harvard Business School New Venture Competition. Courtesy photo
Around the time Andrew Rothaus enrolled in Harvard Business School’s full-time MBA program in 2016, the Zika virus outbreak was peaking in South Florida. Rothaus, who will graduate from the school this spring, had a personal connection to the virus. His sister-in-law, who lived in the Wynwood district of Miami — a Zika hot spot — learned she was pregnant.
“While she was obviously very excited to be pregnant — she really wanted to have a child — she was also very scared,” Rothaus, 28, tells Poets&Quants. “She didn’t know what was going to happen.”
While Zika fever — the sickness associated with the Zika virus that is contracted through mosquito bites — is rated as “extremely rare” by the Centers for Disease Control, with fewer than 1,000 known cases in the U.S. per year, in 2016 pregnant women in the Southeast were deemed to be at the greatest risk. Zika is believed to cause birth defects in the children carried by women who contract it. These facts got the wheels churning for Rothaus and served as the genesis of a product and company now called hour72+, which won a total of $80,000 at this year’s New Venture Competition at Harvard earlier this month (April 18).
PARTNERING WITH A PHYSICIAN
Andrew Rothaus
Rothaus graduated from Princeton in 2011 and spent five years at Macquarie Group’s New York City office as a derivatives trader. When he decided to leave the Sydney, Australia-based financial services firm to get his MBA, Rothaus only applied to HBS in Round 1 and figured he’d apply to Wharton or Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in Round 2 if he didn’t get in.
He got in. “The news was good,” Rothaus says of the HBS Round 1 decision.
Around the time Rothaus learned of his sister-in-law’s pregnancy, his friend Abraar Karan asked for his help with a hair product he was developing. The product was built to have long-lasting features, Rothaus says, meaning you could put it in your hair and it would hold for longer than the average styling product. Rothaus asked Karan if he thought the same product could work on skin and Karan, a physician, thought it probably could.
They decided to test it in the lab. The team took their primary molecule and bonded it to fluorescein, a dye that is essentially used as a florescent tracer, and then applied it to the feet of test volunteers. After a baseline measurement right after application, the volunteers lived their typical lives for the next three days. “They showered, they went to the gym, they went to work — everything normal people do,” Rothaus says. After 72 hours, another measurement — and “what we found was the persistence of skin as measured by the fluorescents was at 52% on average,” Rothaus says.
PRODUCT IS ‘99% MORE EFFECTIVE THAN DEET’
The next step was to bond the product to mosquito repellent. Once that was done, Rothaus and Karan applied it to their own skin. Anecdotally, Rothaus says, it worked. But they decided to take it a step further and have the product tested at a bona fide mosquito lab in South Carolina.
At the lab, volunteers applied the mosquito repellent to their arms and stuck them in a box full of mosquitos. Researchers then tracked how many mosquitos landed on the arms of volunteers, as well as how many actually bit. “Our product outperformed DEET,” Rothaus says of the product test.
After about eight hours in a lab setting, Rothaus says, DEET — the most widely used mosquito repellent in the U.S. — is only about 60% effective. Meanwhile, the citronella and lemon-eucalyptus oil concoction Rothaus and Karan created still performed at 100% after eight hours. By 24 hours, DEET is completely gone, but hour72+ is still at 98%, Rothaus says, which means that 98% of mosquitos didn’t land on a wearer’s arm after a full day and night.
And of the 2% that did land, 100% did not bite — “which makes it 99% more effective than DEET,” Rothaus points out.
Andrew Rothaus and Abraar Karan created a mosquito repellent that was 100% effective in lab tests after 24 hours
NOT MUCH INTEREST AT 2017 COMPETITION
The hour72+ repellent has benefits that reach far beyond mosquito repellency, Rothaus says. In particular, it’s waterproof and it can’t enter the blood stream, and it doesn’t include any synthetic molecules. “Ours just uses natural molecules,” Rothaus explains.
He pitched the product at last year’s New Venture Competition, but at the time the company had just completed the initial persistence testing. The formulations were still very much conceptual. “We had the science-backing that it should work, but not yet the proof that it would work,” Rothaus says. They also pitched in the social enterprise track of the competition.
The product didn’t attract any prize money or much attention from the judges, but Rothaus was convinced it had potential. He applied to and was awarded a Rock Summer Fellowship through the Social Enterprise Initiative at Harvard Business School, which funded the summer for Rothaus so he was able to continue to develop formulations of the repellent and have them tested in the lab.
BECOMING THE ‘TOMS OF INSECT REPELLENT’
By the time this year’s New Venture Competition rolled around, Rothaus and team were ready. They switched to the Student Business Track and won the $75,000 grand prize. They also took the $5,000 audience choice prize. Rothaus’ persistence had been rewarded.
He says going forward, hand Karan plan to sell the repellent in the U.S. on a get-one, give-one model, similar to Toms Shoes, where for each product sold in the U.S., one will be donated in a developing country where mosquito-transmitted diseases are more common. “Our long-term goal is to be the Toms of insect repellent,” Rothaus says. But for now, he adds, they are working to get the product in the hands of governments and non-governmental organizations in some of those countries.
“We really want to get it to the people who truly need it most,” Rothaus says. The team hopes to begin product testing in Brazil and Nigeria by the end of the year.
IMPROVING THE REPELLENT-WEARING EXPERIENCE
Mosquitos have two broad species — anophelinae and culicinae. Rothaus says the same technology they’ve created could be used in repellents against ticks, flies, and other insects, but for now they are focused on the mosquito, which can transmit such deadly sicknesses as malaria, yellow fever, dengue, and chikungunya. “We would like to do both pilots simultaneously to see if there are any differences in efficacy based on the species of mosquito,” Rothaus says.
They also hope to change the overall insect repellent experience.
“Right now, no one likes wearing insect repellent. It’s something that you put on but turn your nose to it. It’s a necessary evil,” Rothaus says. “But we want something that is going to be a pleasant experience — that it at least doesn’t bother them for being on their skin. And we want them to feel good about buying it.”
Rothaus’ sister-in-law, who gave birth to a health baby boy, approves of him using his Harvard MBA to develop a mosquito repellent.
“She has been one of the most supportive people around me and actually has another baby on the way now,” he says. “So she seems to feel safer now that she knows someone has been working on it.”
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