- Behind Holista Colltech–Swang Chai Chuan JV is a story of science, setbacks, lost time and unshakeable belief
- Bringing together Australian sheep skin, Malaysian-linked science, Asian capital, and US wound-care demand
For Dr Rajen Manicka, the 50:50 joint venture between ASX-listed Holista Colltech Ltd and HKEX-listed Swang Chai Chuan Ltd is not merely a significant funding and distribution deal, where Holista provides the technical expertise and SCC the funding at RM5 million and the distribution.
It is the latest turn in a fight that has consumed much of his professional life.
“This is a global game,” Rajen said, describing the Ovicoll Pty Ltd venture as a chance for “two Malaysian companies, public listed, getting together to take on the global collagen market.” Specifically, the core near-term addressable collagen wound dressing segment is around US$460 million (RM1.9 billion) to US$810 million (RM3.3 billion).
This can easily sound like the usual corporate ambition and exaggeration attached to a deal. In Rajen’s case, it comes wrapped in something more personal: fatigue, frustration, defiance, and the indomitable conviction of a man who believes he has spent close to two decades sitting on a technology the world was not yet ready to let him commercialise.
Holista’s work on collagen, Rajen said, goes back more than 12 years, and in parts even further. He traced the journey through work involving Universiti Sains Malaysia, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, NanoMalaysia, the University of Western Australia, Murdoch University, the University of Mississippi, and even US government wound-healing research.
A 2009 ASX media release offers early proof. Holista said then that its ovine research-grade collagen was being used comparatively in a US$5 million biomedical research and commercialisation programme awarded to the Clinical Tissue Engineering Centre at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. The work involved the Calhoun Research Laboratory in Akron, under Dr Judith A. Fulton, on acute and chronic wound treatment using tissue-engineering strategies. The release said initial results showed ovine collagen supported the growth of tissue-engineered skin equivalents with results comparable to bovine collagen.
Why was this important research? According to Rajen, that question became especially relevant in the US because of concerns around mad cow disease and bovine-derived material.
“They were looking at, in a wound situation, is ovine compatible to bovine,” he said.
He claims the earlier work showed sheep collagen could perform “gram for gram, molecule for molecule” in a manner comparable to bovine collagen. In the 2009 release, Rajen was already describing the wound-healing project as “a powerful endorsement” of ovine collagen and as an entry into the highly regulated US market.
That should have been the start of the breakthrough, with recognition and more support from a Malaysian government starved of success stories in the country’s biotech and health sciences sector.
Instead, it became the beginning of a long detour.
Sitting on a golden goose
The obvious question is why, if Holista had promising data more than a decade ago, it is only now trying to scale production through its JV with SCC in Western Australia.
Rajen does not dodge the question.
“We had a facility that was already running in Collie, but the facility was not optimised,” he said.
Then came what he describes as the first major commercial lesson: if you have something valuable, not every potential partner wants to help you scale it. Some may want to learn it, bypass you, or control the upside.
Rajen said in 2017, he had explored a plan with Australian company Kinetic Medical Supplies Pty Ltd under which Holista would supply collagen to a new venture that could eventually be sold to a larger industry player in the US. Kinetic owned a US-based wound care company, Kinetic Healthcare Inc that gave it market presence and credibility.
In that structure, Holista would have held only a small stake in the venture.
“The problem with that is we would have had a 5% stake,” he said. “That means if they sold the company, we will make 5%.”
Unfortunately, the relationship later soured after the Kinetic examined Holista’s plant and process. Rajen claims they tried to source Australian lamb skins and move the processing to the US. Holista, he said, still had an exclusive relationship with the Australian sheep supplier and took legal action that blocked that path.
“We took an injunction against them, and therefore that jammed up the Americans,” he said.
Rajen was ready for the inevitable follow-up question to this. Why didn’t Kinetic just source sheep skins elsewhere in Australia? His answer is that the raw material is not just “Australian sheep skin” in a generic sense, but skin that has been handled, treated, stored, and validated in a very specific way before it becomes usable for collagen extraction. There is a secret sauce here too.
He names the company he has an exclusive partnership with for the sheep skins. Fletcher International Exports Pty Ltd, he said, is the largest sheep slaughterer in Australia, with 28 million kills in 2024. More importantly, according to Rajen, Fletcher’s role was not limited to supply.
He said Fletcher’s had an element of Holista’s patent process built into its operations, including what he described as a “sweat shed” used to treat the skins according to Holista’s patented method. That structure alone, he said, involved an investment of about A$600,000.
For a company of Fletcher’s scale, and with founder Roger Fletcher sitting on the National Advisory Council of Meat & Livestock Australia, Rajen argues that knowingly stepping into a patent dispute would be a risk no serious Australian company could casually take.
And, even if another Australian supplier was willing, Rajen said the issue would then move from sourcing to regulatory validation. Any new supplier would need to generate the stability data required for the US Food and Drug Administration (this being relevant since Kinetic wanted to bring the sheep skins back to the US), including two years of uninterrupted stability data, with skins tested quarterly while stored below 8°C.
In practice, he said, the process could take closer to three years because the data must capture seasonal variation. Sheep skins change across the year as animals build up more fat in their skins during summer to survive autumn and winter. In Rajen’s telling, that is why Holista’s advantage was not simply access to sheep skins, but access to properly treated, validated, and patent-linked raw material.
His interpretation of the episode where Kinetic tried to go around Holista is blunt. “That explains the intervening (lost) years,” Rajen said. “That’s why this time around we’ve decided not to have any foreign participation in our process, except as the customer – Regenerex Pharma from the US.”
That distinction now sits at the heart of the SCC deal. Regenerex Pharma may be the US wound-care customer. But SCC, Rajen argues, is the strategic partner precisely because it is not a foreign technology partner trying to enter the market.
“We went to SCC as we didn’t want to get a partner who will try to outdo us.”
The Malaysian angle is not cosmetic
This is where the story becomes more than a biotech manufacturing play.
Rajen sees the JV as a Malaysian-linked attempt to own the value creation, not merely supply raw material or sell the company too early. Holista is ASX-listed but has deep Malaysian operations and roots. SCC is Hong Kong-listed but Malaysian-rooted, with close to RM1 billion in annual revenue and a strong distribution and logistics base.
For SCC, the RM5 million commitment is not huge. For Holista, it matters. Holista has had to stabilise its finances, deal with legal and regulatory distractions, and rebuild investor confidence. SCC brings balance sheet comfort, operational discipline, and commercial reach.
But to Rajen, the deeper value is trust and alignment.
In his telling, the global collagen industry is dominated by incumbents who have little incentive to allow real challengers to emerge. He believes innovators often get bought and buried.
“If you notice, in the collagen space in the last 20 years, there is no new innovation,” Rajen said in the earlier press briefing. “Everything gets killed by the big boys the moment you’re raising funds. They just buy you and put you on the shelf so they can keep their products and their margins.”
That view may be combative, and it remains Rajen’s claim. But it explains his thinking. He does not want Holista to become someone else’s optionality. He wants the company to control the technology long enough to prove its value.
Halal was there from the beginning
In the Malaysian and Muslim-world, halal is a hygiene factor as well as a competitive differentiator for consumer products and here Rajen has a strong story. He does not present it as a convenient marketing label added after the fact.
The record supports him.
In Sept 2009, Holista announced that it had signed an MOU with Universiti Sains Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia to commercialise halal beauty products and further develop ovine collagen.
The company said the USM collaboration was intended to develop better processes and standardisation protocols in halal collagen, while the UTM collaboration focused on developing a Kacip Fatimah anti-ageing cream with ovine collagen as its base.
That historical detail strengthens Rajen’s present claim that Holista’s sensitivity to halal was embedded early in the company’s work, not discovered later.
“From day number one, every process of ours was halal, from the slaughter, the manufacturing, the enzymes,” Rajen said. “We were very, very sensitive to that, which a US company may not be.”
For Rajen, this is where Malaysian roots matter. The halal angle is not simply a compliance certificate. It shapes raw material choice, enzyme choice, process design, and market access.
The moat: sheep, Australia, patents, and halal
Rajen’s belief in Holista rests on what he describes as multiple moats. He introduced this during the media briefing on the Holista-SCC venture announcement in May.
The first is the source: Australian sheep.
Rajen argues that sheep collagen gives Holista a cleaner route into global markets where other collagen sources face cultural, religious, or health-related barriers.
“Pork is out due to sensitivities of the Muslim and Jewish populations,” he said. “Bovine has a very big issue with Mad Cow Disease.”
Sheep collagen, he believes, avoids both problems, especially when sourced from Australia. Rajen claims Australia offers a unique disease-free sheep environment, and that Holista’s position is strengthened by its access to Australian sheep skin and its patent strategy.
“We are using Australia, which is the only country in the world with disease-free sheep,” he said. “Anybody who wants to go in Australia and wants to use sheep skin to extract collagen will violate our patent. That’s our unbeatable biological and geographical moat.”
The second moat is processing.
According to Rajen, sheep skin is frozen within two hours to preserve the integrity of the collagen. It then goes through a 28-day extraction process. He said Holista produces collagen at 300 kilodaltons, which he describes as the full intact molecule.
He is careful about the process because, in his words, speeding it up could damage what makes the collagen valuable.
“We don’t want to speed the process up,” he said during the SCC JV announcement. “What we want is good yield, and we don’t want to destroy the integrity of the collagen molecule.”
The third moat is nano-collagen.
Rajen said Holista has taken its collagen and reduced it to as small as 110 nanometres. At that size, he claims, the collagen can cross into the skin rather than merely sit on the surface.
“Before, it was really a paste sitting on the skin,” he said. “But now for the first time, we can cross into the skin.”
He also claims Holista has demonstrated an 84-fold increase in absorption. That is a major breakthrough and will be central to the joint venture company, Ovicoll’s competitiveness in the wound healing and dermatology market.
It is this opportunity that attracted SCC. When asked why a company with almost RM1 billion in revenue was investing only RM5 million, a senior executive described the JV as a first step. He said the opportunity has “very strong potential” and that SCC could “look to commit more over the next two or three years if the venture becomes more profitable.”
A wound-care story, not a supplements story
Collagen is often associated with beauty supplements. Rajen is not dismissing that market, but it is not where he sees the highest value.
“To be honest, that market, while it’s very big, it’s got very bad margins,” he said of nutraceuticals.
His preferred markets are wound care, medical dermatology, cosmetics, fillers, and research-grade collagen.
The first serious commercial test is expected to come through Regenerex Pharma in the US. Rajen said Regenerex chairman and CEO Greg Pilant (pic) had been exploring recombinant collagen through Texas A&M before shifting his attention to Holista’s sheep collagen.
Rajen’s argument is that recombinant collagen is expensive, difficult to scale, and potentially more complex from a regulatory data standpoint. “We are using sheep, we are going natural, and, we are scalable.”
According to Rajen, Regenerex will use both standard collagen and nano-collagen. The standard collagen could be used to fill deep wounds before closure, while nano-collagen could help in wound-bed structure and healing.
He offered a vivid explanation: a deep wound is like a hole in the ground. If grass grows over it before the hole is levelled, the depression remains. Collagen, in that analogy, helps level the wound before closure.
“You’ve got to take soil and make the grass level, ground level, first before you start growing the grass on it,” he said.
Rajen believes nano-collagen may build wound structure “brick by brick” instead of “floor by floor,” giving better integrity. But he was also candid: “We think, but we cannot prove it enough, we think the healing will be much faster.”
A founder talking up his company’s technology is to be expected but one interesting point about Regenerex coming in as a potential customer is that Greg has also come in as an investor into Holista and joined the board. Rajen says the two have developed a close working relationship. “We talk practically every day,” Rajen said.
Holista’s Feb 2025 ASX release on its FY2024 unaudited results gives that claim financial weight, disclosing a US$600,000 converting note from Pilant or his nominee — roughly A$900,000 at that time — as part of a broader A$1.545 million converting note issue. The release also said Pilant had requested a board seat as a condition of the note, strengthening the case that Regenerex’s interest went beyond an ordinary supplier-customer discussion.
Rajen is even more excited about the market that Regenerex Pharma can potentially open up. The company is interested in applying Holista’s nano-collagen to wound healing in the US. “Normally, you just put the collagen on the wound, but now (with the nano-collagen) we can actually get into the wound,” Rajen said. “We think we can speed up the wound healing as well. Not just heal the wound.”
According to Rajen, the US wound healing market is valued at US$120 billion with the average annual cost of managing a wound at US$68,000. It should be noted that this is the overall size of the wound healing market in the US. As earlier mentioned, the addressable collagen wound dressing segment is around US$460 million (RM1.9 billion) to US$810 million (RM3.3 billion).
Rajen’s commercial claims are ambitious. He said Holista’s costing work with Regenerex showed strong economics, with gross profit of 82% and net profit of more than 42%. He also said Holista could be competitive against bovine collagen, even with a premium positioning, because sheep skin is a low-cost input. Those numbers will be tested when production at scale happens.
As for production, Rajen clarified that the collagen is produced in liquid form. One tonne of liquid collagen contains about 1.5% collagen, equivalent to roughly 15kg of dry collagen. The plant will produce four tonnes of liquid collagen per month.
The setbacks that made the deal harder
Rajen’s story is also one of distraction and lost time.
He spoke about an ASX-related legal matter during the Covid period, saying it consumed years of focus. He disputed aspects of how he was treated, but acknowledged that the matter was tied to continuous disclosure obligations.
“That distracted me completely for the last four years,” he said.
He also said Holista had earlier expected a RM20 million investment from a local company, but the money did not materialise. “They kept saying, the money is coming, the money is coming,” he said. Eventually, Holista moved on and negotiated with SCC.
That negotiation, Rajen said, took four to five months.
The deal was not straightforward. It was structured as a 50:50 JV, but Holista wanted the right to buy back a certain percentage under defined conditions — a move Rajen said reflected his confidence that the venture would bear fruit for both parties. Rajen also had to provide a personal secondary guarantee, reflecting SCC’s caution in entering a business it did not fully know.
“They don’t know the business, which is where I want them to be,” he said.
It is a revealing remark. Rajen wanted SCC’s capital and commercial strength, but not a partner that would try to absorb the technology itself.
What must happen next
The JV gives Holista a second chance at a technology Rajen believes should already have been global years ago.
But now, the story has moved far beyond a small collagen plant in Western Australia. It has become a bet on Australian biosecurity and manufacturing credibility, Malaysian-linked entrepreneurial grit, Asian capital, and a US wound-care market.
The next milestones are clear: plant construction or relocation, commissioning, certification, production restart, patent clarity, clinical documentation, Regenerex purchase orders, and first revenue.
The two 2009 ASX releases help explain why Rajen has not let this go. They show that Holista was already trying to position ovine collagen for wound healing, tissue engineering, halal applications, and nano-encapsulation more than 15 years ago.
But the hard part of technology entrepreneurship is not only discovery. It is surviving long enough to commercialise.
Rajen’s fight has been long, messy, bruising, and still unfinished. But it is precisely that unfinished nature that makes the Ovicoll JV worth watching.
If he is right, a Malaysian-linked company that spent years being delayed, distracted, and nearly outflanked may yet find its global opening through an Australian sheep collagen platform.
If he is wrong, the JV will join the long list of promising technologies that could not cross the brutal gap between science and commercial scale.
Rajen clearly believes he is closer than ever.
“We have got to hit our big numbers first,” he said. “That’s when you get on the radar.”
For now, the radar has begun to flicker. It has taken 17 years.
AI was used to create the first draft with the writer responsible for the published version.
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