Pros and Comms on the road! Bringing you this special episode from Basel, at the BioTechX Europe event.

In this episode we chatted to some of the key figures from a range of innovative biotech start-ups, hearing what their companies do, where they want to be in 5 years time, and of course, what lessons they’ve learnt about communication during their journeys so far.

The Comms Takeaways

Maaria: Welcome to Pros and Comms, the podcast where I talk to people about their personal and professional stories and uncover the different ways and common themes of resonating with an audience. Because after all, communication is essentially storytelling. Today I’m here in Basel for Biotechx Europe. I’ve talked to some startup companies about their journey in creating a biotech company from scratch and what things they think are important to communicate their offering to their potential audiences.

So, let’s go meet them.

Okay. So I’m here with Rick from Helical. So tell me who you are and your co founders and what your company does.

Rick: Yeah. So my name is Rick. As you mentioned, I’m the co founder and CEO of Helical. With two co founders, Maxim really on the A. I. Side and much on the bio and pharma side.

And basically helical is an A. I. Platform for pharma companies and our genetic workflows help pharma companies to leverage so called bio foundation models. So D. N. A. And RNA sequencing models in their drug discovery processes. So our genetic workflows basically had them to address use cases in patient certification, biomarker discovery, target identification.

Yeah, we actually I have an open core approach. So we have a github So I I I would encourage everybody to check it out and see what’s out there that you can already use

Maaria: Brilliant. And what has your journey to starting up a biotech startup been like? How did you get here?

Rick: Yeah, so actually, we know each other since we were kids I’ve been doing this for the last roughly 15 years.

Maxima and myself, I always want to do medicine ended up last second doing doing engineering. So maximum I really come from the engineering background. That’s why we also very AI infused in what we do and much. It brought us back to the good side of things, being a medical doctor and genomics researcher.

And about 12 months ago, we looked into those bio foundation models. We saw the potential that it has for changing the way AI is done in pharma on DSO. We started talking to pharma companies and we saw While having those discussions, wow, they really see the promises in those models, but it’s really difficult to use those models.

Which AI infrastructure should I use? Which model should I actually use? There are hundreds out there. And basically how do I go from those models to actual use cases in drug discovery? That’s all not straightforward. And by signing our first big pharma company, a customer, we were really convinced that this is the right path to take.

So, yeah, we started Helical. We raised our pre seed or seed funding round, call it as one. We raised three million euros. And so yeah, thank you very much. So now we’re up and running. We’re a team of 10 very talented engineers bio researchers and AI researchers. And now we are really scaling up the product and start working with more and more partners.

Maaria: Brilliant. And so I guess now you’re scaling up, what are your different communication priorities for different stakeholders?

Rick: Yeah, it’s actually a tricky one. And so if you think internally at Helical, then I would say you really have to. bridge the gap between the AI teams and the bio teams. Because it’s 2 different worlds combining together And I think that’s the future of where drug discovery is headed.

So if we don’t align communication there, we will lose information in that passage. We will not get the best product out of that. So that is internally and I would say externally. I think it’s really important to show the potential of those bio foundation models. Why they are intrinsically different than what you have seen in more traditional AI for biopharma.

And why they mark really the shifting points for AI and drug discovery and hence it’s important to invest in this now because I think 10 years from now you will think back to that moment and really see, okay, that was like the pivotal moment where AI started to have like more of a really strong impact on, on, on, on drug discovery.

And I think this type of models, those transformers, but really in DNA and RNA type of modalities are that, are that paradigm shift.

Maaria: Absolutely. So how old is the company?

Rick: About 12 months.

Maaria: Oh, okay. Well, super new. So you’ve done a lot in 12 months. Well done. We

Rick: try. So what’s

Maaria: been your biggest challenges so far, would you say?

Rick: Ah, there are obviously quite a few, but one, and of course, maybe back to communication is that those by foundation ones are a new type of melt algorithms. So there’s not much wet lab validation out there as of now. And yet there are those benchmarks showing that they have that intrinsic understanding of your DNA and can intrinsically understand not only correlation from disease and, factors that drive it, such as gene expressions and others, but that they have really a strong understanding of what are the causal relationships here.

And yet, since that proof is not out there, I think we have to constantly communicate on the potential of them to convince our customers to work with us. And the validation is only going to come from those projects. We are not a data company. We do not gather our own data. So yeah, that I would say is a big challenge of getting customers to, do that first leap of faith.

Maaria: Yep. So year six, what does Helical look like? Where do you want the company to be?

Rick: That’s a good one. We have an open core approach, so I really would like to have the biggest open source community in AI for pharma. And I think. That is definitely possible again to their paradigm shift in technology, but also to the fact that Open source is not such a common approach and for pharma and we really want to build it.

We think that the AI needs to be democratized. So I really want to have the biggest open source community out there. And on the customer side, I really hope that our gigantic workflows can generate new insights that leads to later stage candidates as well and drug discovery. And if we can be part of that journey, that would be really proud.

Maaria: Brilliant. So. You guys are super new, but you’re, you’re a co founder. So what advice do you have for other people maybe considering starting a biotech startup?

Rick: Yeah, I mean, again, we are quite new, so I don’t want to pretend that I have everything figured out. What I can say on the fundraising side though is be sure that you go somewhere where the market can be potentially very large.

If you can show that you can be the right team to go there, I think we’ll have the capacity to raise money. And I think Raising money is an important milestone in accelerating the growth of your company. It is a more aggressive strategy, but I still would recommend it as a strategy because it simply allows it to have more impact at a higher risk, but more impact.

Maaria: Brilliant. And my final question for you, what is your top tip for effective communication?

Rick: Yeah. I would say know your audience which especially in what we do is not that easy. but by understanding who your audience is, try to, to adjust whatever you’re telling them to, from non technical users to like deep AI experts.

In our case, we need to be able to adjust that pitch to all level of expertise because we need to convince a whole chain of stakeholders, not only one person. And if you cannot give that vision and this holistic picture to everybody, then it will be very difficult to sell into those large organizations.

Maaria: Brilliant. Rick, thank you so much. Thank you.

Rick: Thank you. You too. Enjoy.

Maaria: So Mael from Deemea, tell me who you are and what the company is about.

Mael: Of course. So, I am the head of business development at Deemea and basically at Deemea we believe that medical imaging data are really a key factor to improve research outcome in drug development and eventually patient’s outcome in real life.

But the reality of using and leveraging medical imaging data is actually quite painful in this research and clinical trial context. A lot of it is about data collection, structuring quality control, regulatory compliance and so on. operationally speaking, it’s, it’s quite painful.

And so, that’s where we deliver value. So we have developed this AI research platform to really enable pharma companies to fully and easily leverage medical imaging in the context of drug development. And we address today two use cases. The first one is clinical workflow management.

So to really streamline the the workflow of clinicians from data collection to end point assessments medical imaging based end point assessments. And the other use case is about reusing data. So data generated by pharma companies from clinical trials in the past. Today those data are kind of, locked somewhere.

Very, not easy to get access to and that’s where we tend to really create value. enabling easier access to those data. And then, leveraging analysis and so on of those data.

Maaria: So you’re in business development and how long has Deemea been going?

Mael: So we founded the company more than four years ago. Okay. And

Maaria:

Mael: it’s been quite a true rollercoaster, I guess, like, many, many entrepreneurial adventures. Yeah. But quite rewarding, especially today, as we see more and more users research, scientists, but also clinic clinicians and clinical professionals actually using our, our platform in in various disease area.

So we started in orthopedics that’s where we come from. And then we expanded in in other therapeutic areas. Today in cardiology, oncology and rheumatology as well.

Maaria: And what are your communication priorities for your different stakeholders?

Mael: So today we really want to make sure that researchers and clinical professionals in pharma R and D are well aware of the solution that we provide how it actually solves some of their.

problems, daily problems and help them achieve their goals which is I guess better treatments for patients sooner.

Maaria: And you talked a bit about your journey being a roller coaster from starting the company. So what’s been like the biggest challenge so

Mael: far? So, I guess we are in a it’s not, Completely new market, but this particular applications like being able to reuse medical imaging data and, you know, clinical data as a whole is is I mean, very trendy and the, the, the goal for all the players is Really build this market segment, create the market and be able to position yourself within this market segment.

And to do that, you need to do two things at the same time. One is, you know, build, develop validate your technical product platform, but also educate the ecosystem around you and doing those two things, which are quite different. Right. At the same time for a very small startup, that’s the challenge

We are in a much better position. not really comfortable, but not so, not so small startup anymore, but that’s particular you know, challenge was was something we we spend a lot of time and energy And it works, so it’s cool.

Maaria: Brilliant, well clearly, because you’re in Basel with Biotech.

Yeah, yeah. Showing Deemea off. So, where do you think the company will be, or where do you want the company to be in like five years time?

Mael: So, basically we strive to become, be recognized and become the the to go solution for medical imaging based research in pharma sector. So, that’s our goal. So we, we, we want to make sure that we have the best solution and the best platform to deliver value to all the stakeholders, in particular the users of the platform, because that’s where we deliver value.

And making sure that everyone knows about it. Yeah.

Maaria: what advice would you have for anyone considering starting up a biotech company?

Mael: So, test your ideas as soon as possible. With as many, like, target, target users and target payers. Because they are not always the same.

And if you get traction, then go for it. Don’t think too much about all the hurdles you will have to overcome over the years. Just take one at a time and go for it.

Maaria: Brilliant. And my last question for you, Maiel, is what do you think is the most important thing for effective communication?

Mael: So, Make sure to really grasp the gist of your value proposition and really know in detail the needs of your future customers and clients and partners from a really practical standpoint. So get into the nasty details of practical things and make sure you really understand them.

Maaria: Mael from Deemea, thank you so much. Thank you.

So you are Lucas from Exazyme. So tell me a bit about yourself and what your company does.

Lucas: Great. So I’m a biochemist by training. So I spent about a decade in the lab and I joined Exazyme roughly a year and a half ago as one of its first employees.

And we are a Berlin based startup company that was incorporated three years ago with VC money. And we focus primarily on the development of new machine learning tools, specifically for protein engineering. So that’s where my biochemistry, protein fandom of proteins comes in. And we deploy these tools to facilitate the development of new proteins at our partners or clients companies.

For example Right now we focus on collaborations for biocatalysts, for APA manufacturing, but in general the tool is quite broadly applicable so that’s where we currently stand.

Maaria: And what has the journey been like in your sort of biotech career? You’re one of the first employees.

What’s the journey been like?

Lucas: So for me personally or for the company, for both, so maybe yeah, let’s start with the company. Okay. So, our founders come actually from quite yeah, complementary backgrounds. So our CSO, she’s also a biochemist and had a biotech experience in also developing new products also in the biopharma space.

And our other technical co founder, he comes from a machine learning background and was more working on after his academic career in statistics, working on e commerce problems. And they, I think, met by chance, more or less, and realized that the things that he was working on had a lot of commonalities with the challenges in protein engineering, where you often have small data sets and you’re trying to learn a lot from kind of limited data sets and go quickly.

To something that is better extrapolate quickly. So and the third founder someone with primarily a business background. So, I think there was a good amount of happenstance involved in that. And then they started to think about how to develop these ideas and talk to a lot of different potential parties that could be interested in such a tool.

And for me personally I did a PhD and postdoc studying enzyme mechanisms. So, I was, I was mostly interested from, from that direction and these kind of fields. But I then moved to a biopharma strategy consulting after my academic positions, which was primarily working with smaller companies in the early stage of yeah, The right molecules for the right indication and figuring out all of these yeah, initial considerations that need to be made when, when embarking on such an endeavor.

And yeah, when I, when I came across Exazyme I knew the CSO back from my academic research and we got into a discussion. I got quite excited about it, so that’s how these two paths then came together.

Maaria: And the rest is history. And the

Lucas: rest is history, exactly, yeah.

Maaria: How long has the company been going and how long have you been working there?

Lucas: So, the company was incorporated in 2022. Before that, the founders were working on these existing founder stipends that are based in Berlin at the Free University. And I’ve been I have joined XSM a year and a half ago, so. Okay.

Maaria: And what are your communication priorities for different stakeholders?

Lucas: Yeah, I think it’s, it’s quite different. Diverse, right? So maybe let’s start with the, with the partners and customers, since that’s closest to my own experience, and that’s my main task in the company, right?

To translate the capabilities of these new machine learning tools for people who are primarily working in the lab and trying to actually make these proteins work in the essays and setups that are done. So I think It can be quite challenging to communicate the possibilities, but also the caveats in comparison to what has been done traditionally in, in these approaches, right?

It’s also for me not always clear what the, what the current paradigm in a lab that does protein engineering is. So if you’d ask 10 people, you get, you know, 10 different approaches. So it’s also a bit of an art. And then it’s not only, you know, what, what are the new things that I can do with these machine learning tools, but also how can I integrate them maybe in what I’m already doing?

 that’s for me, it’s the priority and challenge to, to get this right, right? To, to highlight these new possibilities, but also the caveats where it might make sense to maybe also leverage the old methods like, No hypothesis driven engineering and so on. Then I think for maybe the investors and that’s a bit more distant from my direct experience.

 So I think that’s more about explaining the. Challenges and maybe particular Milestones that are important to move forward in the biotech space right where it’s often very data driven the barriers to entry can be very high and Yeah, so basically what you need to show before you can really you know sell a project maybe Might not be directly evident.

Maybe someone who’s not who’s not spent some time in the field, so I guess that’s it That’s my hypothesis. internally it’s a combination of these. So, as I said, we have biochemists, but we also have machine learning engineers. So they often speak, you know, somewhat different languages.

So, but I think bringing that together is also part of what, what, yeah, all the value that we provide to, to learn how to bring these two worlds together and, you know, get the most out of it.

Maaria: Absolutely. Be the bridge to, to those barriers.

Lucas: Exactly.

Maaria: So what do you think has been the biggest challenge in the startup journey so far for the company?

Lucas: So I haven’t been around for the very, very early days, but I think it’s also true from that part is in kind of Navigating on the one hand that you have maybe a tool or machine learning tool that can be quite broadly applied, right? So, protein engineering is a technique that can be applied across, you know, biopharma biologicals, but also as enzymes for API manufacturing, but also in industrial biotechnology.

We’ve been talking to agri tech companies and so on. So, So in principle, you have, you know, since we’re in Basel, like a Swiss army knife, right? But then you, of course, you need to focus for business reasons, right? So you can build your proof of concept and, you know, the, the heart validation only in, you know, With a limited number of shots so that we have been primarily focused on enzymes due to these reasons.

So, navigating these complexities of the market, so there are all these different people and companies that use this technique and who could we actually, you know, provide the most value with what we provide. I would say it’s one of the big challenges to find, find the right people and then, you know, explain well how, how that could work with such a new solution.

 it’s also getting in if you don’t, you know, if you’re a newcomer to this field, it’s also not a huge space, right? So people know each other that can, that can sometimes also be a bit intimidating. Yes.

Maaria: Okay. So where do you want the company to be in five years time? As someone working in it, where do you think it will be in five years time?

Lucas: So right now it’s still kind of early days with using these tools, right? So there’s a lot of unknowns that we also have to navigate with our partners, but the goal is definitely to provide kind of the go to solution for machine learning, assisted protein engineering, right?

And to be a major player in the market of providing these kind of services as a kind of tool maker. And then of course as I already alluded to, it would be great to also expand across modalities, right? So far. This is the reason we focused on enzymes mostly, but in principle that could be much more broadly because the innovation that we have done is primarily on the kind of algorithmic or machine learning side, right?

So it could, in principle, enable a lot of different yeah, modalities in that sense. Brilliant.

Maaria: So what advice would you have for people considering starting up a biotech startup? And I guess in your very unique lens of work, working as one of the first employees in the startup what advice would you have for other people thinking about starting their own company?

Lucas: I think One of the most common traps is to be anamoured with a particular solution or technology, right? And and I think it’s really important to be very critical with these kinds of ideas because it’s I think easy to get carried away with kind of what potential this has but then you really need to have the use cases and you have to have the early use cases and the early proof of concept.

 it’s important to go into a lot of depth with these ideas and you know do as much talking to people who who are actually working in the particular domain that you maybe have an idea for a solution for and really pressure test if not only this can work But also if this can actually provide value and if it’s something that people are willing to pay money for right so and I think it’s very important to be very critical at that at that stage because I think it’s easy to have a lot of ideas But then to execute on them, that’s that’s I think Big challenge

Yeah.

Maaria: Okay, and my final question for you. What do you think is the most important thing for effective communication?

Lucas: I think in general, One of the one very important considerations to know the audience, right?

So who are you talking to? If we go back to the different stakeholders, for example, right? So first of all, I think it’s important to, to understand the other party and then to address this kind of you know, their interests effectively or link what, what you are, what you would like to talk about to what they actually can get this kind of what, what is it in for me a question, right?

So. So kind of understanding the audience and tailoring the message, I guess, would be the, would be to my two generic answers.

Maaria: Thank you very much. Lucas from Exazyme.

Lucas: Thank you for

Speaker: joining me and enjoy biotech X.

Maaria: . Bettina from Juli. Thank you for joining me.

Tell me a bit about who you are and what Juli does.

Bettina: So, I’m one of the two co founders. We’re both named Bettina, by coincidence. And Juli is an AI power app for people with chronic conditions. We gather data, identify patterns, and derive recommendations for patients.

Maaria: And what has the journey been like to creating a biotech startup?

Bettina: It’s been a long journey. We’re both serial entrepreneurs. We were joined by some medical experts, a professor from the University College London that helped us. Get the background that we needed and then we built the app and try to build something that is appealing to customer. I have a consumer background I tried to build something that doesn’t feel like a health app, but more like something that’s fun to use And we were able to get a first customer in the pharma industry that white labels the app as a companion app so that’s great.

We’re very excited.

Maaria: Brilliant. And how long has the company been going then?

Bettina: We’ve been up and about for about four years now. We started right at the pandemic. That’s been a bit of a challenge.

Maaria: Yeah, what a great time to start.

Bettina: Absolutely. What else would you do in that time than this?

Maaria: Brilliant. So what are the communication priorities for your different stakeholders?

Bettina: For us, it’s mainly getting contact, It’s in the right industry. So that’s pharma, large healthcare providers and payers. So far we’ve mainly attended conferences and reached out to the attendees of the conferences prior to that by email. We gather newsletter addresses and send out newsletters. And we try to come up with a very compelling branding that stands out which is what we hear a lot at conferences.

People come along our booth and say, Judy, wait, I’ve seen you somewhere.

Maaria: That’s what you want people to think.

Bettina: Yes, exactly.

Maaria: So what would you say your biggest challenge has been so far in your startup journey?

Bettina: The financial crisis last year. You know, people are not that easy in spending money, investing in startups like that.

We realized the healthcare industry is very conservative, very careful industry. They think a lot whether they should do. Stuff or not. And if they do, they want a lot of safety barriers to make sure things go right in there, especially in the pharma industry. You make one mistake and you’re out. And that that makes it hard to just say, let’s start small with a little pilots and see how things going.

Maaria: And then we evolved from that. That’s not the way pharma works. So where do you want the company to be in five years time?

Bettina: Oh, we want to be the number one app for people with chronic conditions, like the aspirin for chronic conditions, pretty clearly.

Maaria: Yeah, and what chronic conditions are you working with at the moment on the app?

Bettina: We cover the ten most prevalent, from diabetes to migraine to asthma to chronic pain. But the app is built in a very modular way. We could add another condition, let’s say you wanted to have Parkinson’s, I built you Parkinson’s in a matter of a few weeks.

Maaria: Wow, what a quick turnaround then to get these all together.

Bettina: Yeah, and what is important, we also cover the comorbidities because half of the Western population has a chronic condition and 60 percent of these people have more than one. There are some combinations that are quite common. People with asthma tend to have anxiety, which makes sense in a way. Yeah.

People with chronic pain or migraine tend to have depression because they’re so frustrated about their situation. So, there’s a lot of these combinations going on, especially a combination between a mental health issue and a non mental health issue. It’s a very, very common thing to, to exist and there are very few companies that, that cover this, that take this holistic approach towards patients.

Say, okay, you are not just an asthma patient, you are not just a depression patient, you are you. With in all the entirety you are, you, where you are, how you live, how, how well you feel at the moment, and with these conditions. And that’s what we’re trying to cover.

Maaria: Fantastic. So you’ve been at it for about four years now, doing a biotech startup.

What advice would you have for other people thinking of starting up a biotech company?

Bettina: Be courageous. You’ve gotta be a bit mad because it’s quite a rollercoaster. But I’d say communication, communication, communication. You can’t have that. If you, if you walk along these startup booths, you see you can have the greatest product in the world.

If you are unable to tell people what it does and what the benefit of it is, you’re doomed.

Maaria: Well, on that note, what is your top tip for effective communication?

Bettina: Have a great brand identity that stands out. And take it through to the very end. Do everything you can to keep that and be consistent in your communication.

Not only with, you know, colors, that’s the obvious one, but in the arguments that you use, in the story that you tell. Consistency, really penetrating three or four points over and over and over again to make them stick in people’s head. In communication they say you need to tell something ten times before it really sticks with somebody.

So if you change your arguments over and over again. You have a challenge in doing so.

Maaria: Absolutely. Bettina from Juli, thank you so much and enjoy Biotech X.

 So, I’m with Alex from Data Harmony at Biotech X. So, Alex, tell me a bit about yourself and what Data Harmony does.

Alex: So, yeah, I’m Alex. I’m a geneticist by training. I’ve been working in biomedical research for the past eight years or so.

Predominantly working on genome engineering tools and gene therapy applications. And For the past 10 months me and my colleagues Luke Grimes and Joe Babich, we’ve been working on a life science platform for data for data management, data processing, and all things data, essentially, a co pilot for, for data and life sciences, if you want.

And our focus is the user experience for our clients. So enabling non technical experts to utilize and harness the power of cloud computing data management without any knowledge of programming or back end infrastructure. So we can also help users containerize applications, provide a user interface, and with the back end of the cloud to deploy those applications to their own customers.

Also enabling them to white label their own workflows. So yeah, that’s our that’s us as a company in a nutshell.

Maaria: So you’re a co founder of the company. What has the journey, the biotech startup journey been like for you?

Alex: So it’s, it started off basically, yeah, like I said, 10 months ago in December.

Is that 10 months? Yeah. So we started the same team, the same co founders a different startup, Data Bound which was a cloud consulting and data science consultancy. We were focusing on small and medium sized businesses in the U. K. And that firm was always working on projects. We were bootstrapping ourselves at that point.

And we realized that over the past three years, we couldn’t really scale beyond a certain point. So we had customers coming in and leaving finishing projects, which, you know. Was fairly successful, but we couldn’t scale. We couldn’t start this journey full time. So we decided first of all, because we realized some customers requested the same features, same tools for one thing.

And because we really wanted to refocus our attention to life science research, which was where my heart sits. So for that purpose, and the ability to to to access investment, we decided to build a product. So that’s where data harmony came in the same team, the same co founders. So the past 10 months were basically two phases the first phase was just really deep dive into market research talking to potential customers understanding what their pain points were and then for the past three four months.

We were actually starting to build based on those pain points and insights. We we gathered Yeah,

Maaria: and at this stage in the company, what are your communication priorities for different stakeholders?

Alex: so We have basically, two, two different types of customers, the academic and the SMEs and SMEs in particular, those that have just spun out of universities.

For the universities the most important aspect is actually safety and security, convincing them that our set up, make sure that their data doesn’t leave the country for instance. That’s, that’s something. That many are very, um, very particular about, which is like completely understandable.

So we try to communicate from the start how, you know, our system is set up, how we prioritize from the start their security, their data safety. And It’s more over a focus on the costing. So making, making clear that the way we set up our system will not cost them more than we have agreed upon from the beginning, which is like something difficult to do with a, with a cloud based setup.

Costs can skyrocket very fast. On the other hand, for small, medium sized businesses, it’s basically the ability to demonstrate that we can build things and features for them quickly. Every business will be different. Every business will want a slightly different palette of features available to them.

So, convincing them that we can work on a more interactive kind of basis more like a partnership than a, you know, a customer to provider kind of, level. We are in this together. We aim to help them do their research. We help them deploy their own tools for research. So that’s why it’s more like, collaboration,

Maaria: Collaborative approach to SMEs. So, what would you say has been the biggest challenge in your startup journey so far?

Alex: Finding the pain points. So, it’s, I mean, it’s easy on a very high level to say that people like academics and non academic researchers in the life sciences have had difficulties in managing and working with data.

But to pinpoint exactly what the difficulties are has been somewhat of a challenge. And I think we’ve, we’ve gotten to a point where with a lot of yeah, interviews conversations, and also with some quantitative data where we also have raised quite deep understanding by a questionnaire type of analysis.

 that was, the first phase of the journey. And now the second big difficulties is raising money to, to grow because we have customers that are interested in, in using features. That we haven’t managed to build to the, you know, usability extent. So, being able to work on the product development full time with a bigger team will make us, you know, grow very fast very quickly if we have the right resources.

Maaria: So, where do you want the company to be in five years time?

Alex: So, we see ourselves as an enabler of science. I still love it. Everything that is related to gen genetics and gene therapy in particular. So, I see myself and the company being a key enabler for research at various different levels.

Being an integrative part of, uh, the research journey for smaller companies where they gather their data On site, that data is directly transferred to our platform. We have a long term vision for that. All the processing steps may run in automation. And then they just need to visualize the data in the way they want to do so.

So that’s kind of our long term vision, what we see ourselves in. Like, basically being the enabler for scientists who really like doing the, the lab work, really like doing the experiments, and then looking at the data, understanding the data.

Maaria: Okay, so what advice do you have for people who are considering starting a biotech company?

Alex: Find people you trust to build it together, and then find a problem that you want to solve really badly. So, it’s, it’s gonna the, if you focus on the problem, if you started to become obsessed with the problem the way you address the problem might, might change over time. But that really focuses your kind of your vision on, you improving the, the, the customer journey

 And yeah, like I said choosing co founders that you trust which will be come key when, well, there are some difficulties in understanding if there’s different points of view, that’s kind of hard.

Yeah.

Maaria: Brilliant. And my final question for you. What do you think is the most important thing for effective communication?

Alex: Honesty. So, of course there’s a certain part of selling your idea. Making what you want to build, either what you already have or what you will build for your customer come across in the most positive light.

For that a story of customer journeys might help. But once what you tell customers or potential clients doesn’t sound reasonable, they will just not trust you and just leave the conversation. So, making sure that You come across as trustworthy and someone you can work with long term because that’s what we try to build.

So we try to build long term relationships, not just one off interactions. We don’t want to sell a product once and then be done with it, but rather build relationships that we can build upon. Brilliant.

Maaria: Alex from Data Harmony, thank you so much.

Alex: Thank you too.

Speaker 5: So I’m with Sebastian from Alba Genomics.

Maaria: So, Sebastian, tell me a bit about yourself and then what Alba does.

Sebastian: Thanks, Maria. Yeah, hello. Thanks for interviewing me. So, my name is Dr. Sebastian Müller, and I’m a bioinformatician by training, which basically means analyzing and writing software for biotech or universities that dabble into sort of modern biotech innovations.

So, usually, that requires It’s some sort of like analysis and that’s what my company Alva Genomic does. So we take the data from biotech companies, for example, and give them a rundown what’s in there, analyzing what in software.

So there’s been a lot of. sequencing innovations nowadays and people are struggling to actually make sense of that. So that’s where we are positioned.

Maaria: What is your biotech startup journey been like?

Sebastian: Well, yes, a bit of a roller coaster, I would say. So, which is something you kind of sign up for.

It’s not, it’s not something with like a stable day today thing. So, yeah, but I, I really enjoyed that. It’s. coming from an academic background, the whole business design was quite challenging. So, so that, that was, that was a bit of a mouthful, but yeah, we didn’t enjoy that. So it’s a good journey. Not much sleep.

Maaria: How long has the company been going?

Sebastian: So, we founded 2020, just when the pandemic kicked in. So What’s it? 24. So like three and a half years.

Maaria: So what would you say has been one of your biggest challenges during creating your startup?

Sebastian: it’s the business side. So acquiring all this knowledge, but also finding clients. So I think this is It’s an ongoing biggest challenge finding the right clients. And my experience is it’s all about networking, at least in the first phase. And this is quite, quite like an element of luck involved.

Maaria: So, so, and you can’t really control that, but with like patience and doing good work, like there’s a, like word of mouth sort of situation which your clients, if you They, they like what you do, they, they will recommend, so it’s a, this is how to overcome the challenge. But yeah, it’s still, it’s still like getting, getting clients and managing the expectations,So where do you want the company to be in five years time?

Sebastian: Five years time? so, so it’s a, it’s a small company at the moment, so I want to basically grow it into a mid sized company. But the, the focus being having bioinformaticians on board that are talented and also nice to work with. So, so having this kind of like really nice work environment and basically being a sort of brand in the space, oh, alpha genomics, that’s, that’s the place to go.

If you do, for example, single cell genomics, those guys, they really know what, what, what What to do. So having like this kind of like really nice environment as well as the knowledge to have a name in the field.

Maaria: Brilliant. And so you’re almost four years in. So what advice would you have for someone who’s considering starting a biotech company?

Sebastian: I think my biggest advice would be getting a mentor because someone who has gone through that journey recently, so not too long ago, maybe like a couple of years, three, four years, so someone that could be serving as a role model.

Approach this person even if it’s someone you don’t know yet. A lot of people are quite approachable. That’s the kind of, like, experience I made. If you, if you’re kind of genuine and honest in the approach, Then people are actually happy to be mentors. And I think that’s one of the key things to have in mind.

That actually goes for a lot of life situations, like, like general career, getting a mentor. It’s like, it’s very simple advice. A lot of people don’t do it. Get a mentor.

Maaria: I would absolutely agree with that. So my final question for you, Sebastian, is what do you think is the most important thing for effective communication?

Sebastian: Right. So. I think apart from the obvious, which is being polite, for example, which I had a time in the UK, so that’s where I learned to be polite, be a polite communicator is also getting to the point, which is something you learn in Germany. So based in Germany. So, and I think this is the obvious one, but one specific one is calendly.

So. One of the big chores in communicating is setting. For example, meeting appointments and currently is absolutely fantastic. So basically you just get your schedule out there and people can book you in. And it’s absolutely fantastic. So it saves you a lot of work and the communication becomes much more streamlined because you just have like maybe like a 10 minutes meeting and you get like a lot of information, which would otherwise be like a very long email exchange.

So that, that would be like a non obvious advice.

Maaria: Great. Well, lovely to meet you. Sebastian from Alba Genomics.

Sebastian: Thank you very much. very much, Maria.

Maaria: Okay, so, I’m with Pedro from Neobe Therapeutics. So Pedro, tell me a bit about yourself. What Neobe Therapeutics does?

Pedro: Yes, so I’m Pedro as you said, I’m the CEO and one of the co founders of Neobe Therapeutics with Annelies Soulier, who’s kind of in the background here as well.

My background was as a cancer researcher. I worked as an academic in cancer research for about 13 years and one of the areas that I was really interested in when I was doing my research was basically All of the components that form a tumor that aren’t the cancer cells. How these cancer cells interact with different components of the host, different cells that make up a tumor, different structural components that make up a tumor, and the way that they can influence the way that cancer spreads and the way that they respond to therapies.

And I, as an academic thought that this was an area that really, really needed some addressing and some innovation, and I was quite frustrated that I didn’t see a lot of, kind of, new Applications coming out of this space. And I myself wanted to start working on something that had actual real life impact.

So after finishing my postdoc a few years back, I started working with a venture creation company in the UK called Deep Science Ventures to start developing new innovative ways to try to address this problem. And I think, new ways to break down some of the constraints within these other components of a tumor that prevents therapeutic efficacy.

And we came up with the idea of using synthetic biology to design bacterial components that can go into the tumor and break down some of these barriers directly in the tumor without affecting healthy tissues. And that’s when we started Neo back in 2021, three and a half years ago now.

Maaria: Fabulous so, what has the journey been like in creating a biotech startup for you?

Pedro: It’s been a journey because we are not your traditional kind of biotech spin out story, right? The majority of other biotechs out there are you know, someone who’s spinning out interesting technology or an interesting target that they found as part of their you know, academic studies.

Whereas we had an idea. And we had a problem that we wanted to solve, and we wanted to develop an innovative solution for that problem, which means that we basically started from scratch. So back in 2021, it was me and my co founder in West London in a shipping container with a very kind of modest pre seed investment and an idea and a real kind of mission to try and bring this idea to life.

So, you know, it took, it took a little bit of time. But in two years, we managed to like go from that to having an actual team where we’ve developed our platform and managed to get our platform built into a couple of different therapeutic pipelines and one lead asset that we’ve managed to generate quite a lot of data on demonstrated that we are actually able to do what we set out to do back in 2021.

Maaria: So on that, now you’ve got your therapeutic pipeline, what would you say are your communication priorities for different stakeholders?

Pedro: So cycling back a little bit to like build up a little bit more on what we’re actually doing. Using synthetic biology to engineer bacterial components that can go into solid tumors and basically act as microscopic Trojan horses that can break down some of the fibrotic components that you have in these tumors that prevent drugs from entering the tumor effectively, that prevent immune cells from entering the tumor effectively, and basically that make solid tumors not respond to therapies very well.

So we’re designing these bacteria to be basically. therapeutic sensitizers. They go into the tumor, they modify the physical structure of the tumor, and then we hit these tumors with existing drugs and we get these patients to respond in cases where they currently don’t. Which comes with some communication challenges, particularly the fact that we have to explain to people why we believe that using engineered bacterial therapeutics is the right way to be able to achieve this.

this. It’s a completely, you know, new therapeutic modality and it’s something that people are maybe not necessarily as used to hearing about as they are, you know, other biologics, antibodies, cell therapies, even viruses, right? So we need to be very active and kind of being out there and explaining to people that, you know, one We’ve known the relationship between bacteria and cancer therapy since the beginning of the 20th century.

So this is not a new idea. Cancer patients have been receiving bacteria as a disease. We’ve been using this, you know, therapeutic as therapeutics since the seventies. Patients with bladder cancer receive injections of the BCG bacteria, and it’s been always completely safe. And we have all of these strategies that we’re introducing into our bacteria that we’re able to do through synthetic biology to make it a completely safe, but more importantly, a very targeted and effective therapeutic modality.

And being able to tell that story, and being able to explain that story. Why we believe that this is going to make a real difference in the lives of cancer patients is incredibly important for us to be able to progress as a company.

Maaria: Absolutely. So what would you say during your three and a half years of starting Neo been your biggest challenges?

Pedro: I feel almost dumb saying this because it’s the cliche that everyone’s going to tell you about fundraising, right? We, we, we started the company in 2021. Which means that by the time we had started building our data on, we’re ready to start fundraising. We’d actually just gone past the biotech fundraising peak, and we were just starting to hit the market dump of the last couple of years.

So we were basically trying to fundraise for a company at the very early stages of the development of a completely new therapeutic therapeutic idea at a time when the market was really, really difficult. So to be able to get through this was definitely, I think, our biggest challenge. We were incredibly fortunate that we were able to close a seed round at the end of last year, at the end of 2023.

And with that, we grew our team and we managed to like start generating some really exciting data in vivo. And we’re now kind of ready to start taking the company to the next stage and start thinking about the clinic. And at that point, I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of other challenges that we will have to face.

To work on, particularly with you know, manufacturing of our products, but it’s something that we’re starting to to work on now.

Maaria: So where do you want the company to be in five years time?

Pedro: We’re, we’re ambitious and we like to, and we like to move fast. So right now our pipeline and our plan is to get an IMD approval by 2026 and to start getting into patients by 2027.

So where ne ostomy, where where I’m planning to be in five years time, I hope that by that point we will have proved that our bacterial products are not only safe, but they’re effective in actual cancer patients in breaking down these, these barriers to therapeutic efficacy. And I hope that at that point we’re sort of actively starting to get into kind of phase two clinical trials and, and partnering.

With different biopharma companies demonstrating the effects that our bacterial products can have in expanding the efficacy of a lot of different biologics in cancer patients.

Maaria: Exciting. Watch this space.

Pedro: I hope so. Thank you.

Maaria: So what advice would you have for people considering starting a biotech company?

Pedro: Go for it. You know, just, just, just take the leap. Just, just take the leap.

It kind of depends on, on how you’re going to, how you’re going about building your biotech company But I think, you know, ultimately one of the most important things that you need to think about is if you’re getting into biotech Because you’re really trying to make a difference in health care, then you need to start with your patients in mind.

And you need to, from a very, very early point, when you’re starting to design your therapies, when you’re starting to design your, your tools, whatever it is that you’re doing, think about what’s that going to look like in the current, you know, standard of care pipelines in these patients, and think about how you can coordinate with different pharma stakeholders to make sure that we can that you can get into patients as effectively as possible.

Because what you don’t want to do is to have a brilliant idea and start like moving really, really quick into the R& D and completely leave your process development, manufacturing, CMC considerations for afterwards and then suddenly find yourself in a position where the two just don’t work together and you don’t actually have a path to the clinic.

That’s going to be you know, a problem with with not only you. being able to achieve what you’re ultimately trying to achieve, which is to bring benefit to the lives of patients, but for you to also be able to like get investment and get some traction with pharma. So start thinking about process development and manufacturing early.

It’s important.

Maaria: Great advice. Okay. My final question for you is what do you think is the most important thing for effective communication?

Pedro: I mean, I think knowing how to tell a good story is, is essential. Kind of don’t, Forget that, you know, people have busy lives and people have limited attention spans, so if you want them to listen to what you have to say, you need to give them a reason to listen to what you have to say. So have a hook and get to that hook quickly and know how to tell a story that actually can be compelling to people so that they want to find out more about what it is that you want to do.

Speaker 9: Brilliant. Pedro from Neo Therapeutics, very

Speaker 10: much. very much.

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