Interview with Limula – Top Innovator series

Limula is a Life Science start-up based in Lausanne, Switzerland. The company was established with the mission to help bringing the most personalized cancer treatments to the patients in need, at reasonable cost, wherever they are. To achieve this goal, Limula’s multidisciplinary team provides a unique technology for producing CAR T-cell therapies at scale, through automation.
The start-up, founded in 2020, is successfully hitting milestones after the other, with the last one being the announcement of a € 4.7 million EIC grant to Limula and 6 European institutes and technology companies EU.

We had the chance to talk with Luc Henry, CEO of Limula who told us about the start-up, its past and future journey, and shared precious advice for young entreprenurs.

What was the inspiration behind your idea and how was Limula born?

The concept behind Limula’s technology is the brainchild of my CTO Yann Pierson. He identified the problem, invented a solution, patented it, found a name for the company and designed the cool logo. He then asked me if I would be interested to turn all of this into a company. When he showed me his first results, I did not hesitate a minute and we started looking for funding to run a proof-of-concept. I quit my job and helped him structure the project, build a team, all what was needed to take his invention to the next stage of development. We have incorporated a company in November 2020 and spent the past 18 months showing that we could indeed use our device to produce cell therapies.

What market needs are you currently addressing?

The problem we are trying to solve is the worldwide shortage of manufacturing capacity for highly personalised cancer treatments called Cell and Gene Therapies (CGT). Some are already on market, but their production is so complex and costly that only very few patients benefit from their life-saving properties. And with the number of clinical trials currently ongoing, we know that there will be many other cell therapies approved in the future. We want to provide a platform technology to support their manufacturing at scale.

Because of their costs, cell therapies, and in particular CAR T-cell products, are currently used in last resort situations, but there is a clear shift towards earlier line of treatment for indications where they have shown clear benefit. And it is only the beginning. There are 6 FDA-approved gene edited cell therapies, all for haematological cancers, but projections show there could be 100 by 2030, with a clear shift towards solid tumours. It is a very exciting time to be involved.

Can you tell us a bit more about your technology?

Our innovative solution is composed of a mechatronic device for process automation, and a single-use plastic kit containing our core bioreactor technology. We patented the design features that enable very unique functionalities, including in-situ centrifugation. This allows us to keep the precious cells sample in the same container along the entire manufacturing process. In essence, our device encapsulates the entire process, and incorporates multiple automation solutions, while removing the need for manual steps.

We want to help the CGT industry intensify the process, by making more treatment doses per square meter of cleanroom facility.

Who are your competitors and how does your technology differ from theirs (e.g. Miltenyi Prodigy®, Lonza Cocoon® etc.)?

Very early on in the project, I learnt that our biggest competitor is the status quo. The whole field of cell and gene therapy suffers from a lack of truly effective manufacturing solutions. Several actors you mentioned have invested significant resources in developing solutions, but I am more concerned about the culture and regulatory shift required to transition from manual to automated production. In a sense, I consider these solutions trailblazers that will facilitate our market entry when our product is ready. To make sure we have something valuable, we constantly seek inputs from potential users. Every conversation is an opportunity to learn more about the problems they face and the limitations of existing and competing solutions. At the moment, we see a lot of interest for our technology because it performs some process unit operations better than what’s already out there.

Considering that many startups fail, weren’t you afraid of failing (in the beginning)?

I was not afraid of failing when we started two years ago, and I am still not today.

There is no plan B.

I believe that if I looked at an exit door that is not success (selling the start-up to a company large enough to deliver your solution at scale, or going public for doing the same), I would get distracted from the objective. Of course, my co-founders and I have invested a lot into this project, both in cash and in opportunity cost, but if it all stopped tomorrow, I would still consider it a success at a personal level. I meet super interesting people every day, I learn as much as I possibly can while giving a lot to my team and others around me, and I built something that I hope one day will make a difference for patients. This is more rewarding than anything.

What are the most important lessons you learnt in the process of creating your start-up?

The most important lesson I’ve learnt so far is that it is not enough to be convinced ourselves that our solution is better, smarter, cheaper than what already exists. To convince future customers, investors and employees, you need to show them what benefits you bring to them. And that takes a lot of communication skills. Someone once told me: ‘If the story is not clear, the strategy probably isn’t clear either’ – I think it perfectly summarises the problem a lot of deep-tech founders face:

make sure you fully understand your technology and market, but make sure also you clearly express your value proposition to anyone involved.

What, in your opinion, is the most important value an entrepreneur should have to succeed?

The two first values that come to my mind when I think of an entrepreneur are dedication and humility. Dedication because as a team, you have to invest all of your time, energy and intellect to solving a problem with your solution, a job no one else will do for you. Humility because you interact with so many talented people that you have to accept that most of them know better. Actively looking for constructive criticism is the only way to leverage expertise and include all pieces you can collect to the giant puzzle that is a start-up project.

Where do you see Limula and yourself in the next 5-10 years?

Typical interview question! Of course, I want to see Limula thrive, and see our product on the market before 5 years, being used to support a broader access to cell therapies. I really want to become the CEO that makes it possible, and keep surrounding myself with women and men who bring their passion and expertise to the company. The vision is not just to build a machine, but to bring disruptive innovation to this field, and make it possible to produce cell therapies routinely, at scale. I do not want to spoil the surprise, but if everything goes according to plan, Limula will be much more than a tool provider in 10 years.

How supportive was the Swiss ecosystem to build a startup?

Switzerland has an incredibly dynamic and supportive ecosystem, and at the same time is a very comfortable place. Having spent over 10 years abroad during my education and my research career, I feel privileged here and I hugely benefit from being Swiss-born, and I want to be very critical. I am always amazed when I look at the start-up founders in the ecosystem because it seems to me that large majority are foreigners (I could not find any data), and it is much riskier and more complicated for them to launch a company in Switzerland than it is for me.

Apart from that, it is absolutely clear that the geographical situation, the quality of the workforce, the multilingual and multicultural environment, the non-dilutive funding provided by the government for innovative projects, the density of research institutions and the infrastructure in general together make Switzerland one of the best places to launch a fintech, deep-tech or life science start-up.

Can you tell us more about your team?

We are 3 co-founders, and a team of 7 in total. The intrinsic multidisciplinary nature of our project means that we need skills in engineering and biology. That is what I find most interesting in this project: we build a machine that needs to perform highly complex biological processes. So complementary expertise is key. Yann is the inventor. He has a maker attitude and nothing is impossible. Tom brings 10 years of consulting and corporate experience, and has the financial, legal and administrative aspects under control. I spend most of my time discussing with potential partners and customers, and with investors and key opinion leaders. My communication skills are my biggest asset, but my science background is central to my understanding of how we can develop something that is useful at the end.

What do you look for in future members?

Building the team with the right people is clearly one of our biggest challenges. It is not just the skills, but also the right mindset, the willingness to learn and be flexible in a highly uncertain environment. With my co-founders, we are working really hard to give everyone the space to grow with the company, and a chance to contribute to a very exciting project with the necessary resources. It is our responsibility to bear the risk and provide the best possible work environment to our colleagues.

What would be your advice for the wanna-be entrepreneurs out there/people who are thinking to make the step to start a startup company?

Patience is key. As my co-founder Tom always says,

to be successful, a start-up needs 3 things: a great team, a great product and a market opportunity. If you feel like one of these 3 aspects is missing, it may not be worth the risk.

You may learn a lot, but will probably fail. I have been looking for a project like Limula for over 5 years. I had several opportunities, but each time something was missing. If you do not have all 3 aspects at hand, work for someone else, learn as much as you can from other entrepreneurs, about the market, the technologies out there, figure out the gaps and keep an eye out, build your network. When the time is right, do not think twice, jump and invest everything you have into the launch phase. It takes a lot of time, a lot of work and a lot of sacrifice. But it never feels like ‘work’.

SHORT BIO

Luc earned a DPhil (PhD) from the University of Oxford, UK. Before co-founding Limula with Yann Pierson and Tom Eaton, he spent 4 years as a personal advisor to the President of EPFL, Prof. Martin Vetterli. He is a skilled scientist, with 10 years of research experience in chemistry, biotechnology and immunology. He has lived in Sweden, Germany and the UK before he returned to Switzerland in 2012 to launch several entrepreneurial projects at the interface between life science and innovation. In 2014, he co-founded Hackuarium, a community laboratory providing infrastructure and mentorship to over 50 entrepreneurs, artists and curious minds interested in experimenting with technology and biology. In 2015-2016, he was the managing director of European science magazine Technonologist. Luc is also the co-founder of the Science Booster, a crowdfunding platform dedicated to science projects. Over the past 5 years, the Science Booster helped more than 100 projects collect over EUR 1.8M from the crowd.

Interview with 3Brain – Top Innovators Series

Interview by Franklin Leong

3Brain is a Swiss startup focused on producing state-of-the-art CMOS-based live-cell analysis systems for drug discovery. Their success had led them to improve their technology for over 15 years and they are now in their third generation of device. They aim to change the standard way cell data acquisition is conducted by improving the resolution and the amount of collected data, essentially transforming a standard plastic dish for cells into an intelligent device integrating multiple processing cores. We will understand more about the company from the CEO, Mauro Gandolfo himself.

What is the origin of the name of the company?

This is what we get asked often. In the beginning, there were three founders and we were focusing on brain applications. Additionally, the arborizations of the neurons forming the brain resemble a tree, which rhymes with ‘three’, and as you might realize, our logo also incorporates the design of a “neuronal tree”. This was the main reason why we went for ‘3Brain’.

Could you tell us more about the core technology used by the company?

Of course, as you already know, we are working with CMOS-based microarrays. Our company is the first in the world to use microchips in direct contact with cells to acquire data from biological samples. What we did was to use a microchip, the same technology that powers our computers, mobile phones and cameras, and modify it in such a way that it could sense and measure cells. The microchip is therefore integrated inside a culture well. Currently, we are taking the technology a step further: our chips are now also able to perform data pre-processing. We call this the BioSignal Processing Unit (BioSPU).

What are the advantages of having the processing unit within the well where cells are cultured?

To give you an idea, I will compare it with the standard technologies. Typically when you have the cells inside a well and you extract data (via microscopes or electrodes), the information from the cells travels along cables until it reaches a processor on a workstation. This is where the data gets processed, an essential step to obtain results. There are a series of bottlenecks in data acquisition and data transmission that limit the amount of data that can be eventually processed.

In our case, by essentially taking the processing unit and placing it in direct contact with the cells, we can utilize the full power of the microchip technology to process much more data compared to other technologies. And data is the key nowadays.

For instance, more data means better artificial intelligence since AI needs to crunch big data in order to become “smart”, i.e. more effective.

Now, think about drug screening where multiwell plates are used to measure cellular activity. When you use a microscope to scan a 96-well plate, it is done sequentially. You read information from one well and then you move on to the next. If you have 96 wells to scan, this can take tens of minutes. In our case, we read out in parallel all the wells at the same time. So it takes 100 times less time than what the standard technology requires.

What were the challenges associated with a technology-centered startup?

In fact, the founders also have, in addition to their business background, bio-engineering expertise that enables them to tackle the challenges inevitably associated with a deeptech. To answer your question, one of the main difficulties during the development of these chips that need to stay in contact with cells, themselves submerged in liquid, was to accomodate both the chip and the cells. Imagine submerging the CPU of your computer in saline solution, it will stop working in the blink of an eye. On the other side, the cells need a proper environment (e.g., right temperature) to stay alive and we also need to take this into consideration.

Could you tell us more about how you improve your devices from one generation to another?

There are two main paths that we follow. The first is for sure talking with our customers, and understanding their needs. Their needs are concrete and based on their experiences. Over here, it is basically a data-driven analysis of what to develop next, when, and where to go. The second path is more about looking for trends. For these, we don’t ask the customers directly, we do some analysis and we also have to use a bit of intuition. It is about understanding what will be the trend in three or four years from now. For instance, a few years ago, we realized that in the future there will be more and more people working on organoids, small 3D cell ensambles that hold much hope to help finding new medicines. Thus, we started the development of a technology that can address this market. In fact, this technology will be officially in the market this year. It is a 3D microchip array that helps to penetrate inside the 3D structure of the organoid and read out information from the inside. We have started the development of this technology more than four years ago, and we think that it was the right decision.

What’s the biggest difference between when you first started in a small team and now?

We did not change much as we are still 23 at the moment. Of course, you will start spending more time doing meetings and managing other people as you progress, to keep everyone on the same page and to push in the same direction. In the past, when we were only the co-founders, we sometimes didn’t even need to communicate because we knew each other well and we knew what had to be done. With a bigger team, there is a need for more communication and coordination.

Would you like to say something to your team?

Of course, thanks for the opportunity. I would like to thank the great team that, with a bit of luck and a bit of wisdom, we have managed to put together. I think it is really the “super-intellect” of the company that is making this adventure and our success unfolding.

So yes, I think that the most important thing is the value of our team, even more than the value of our technology.

Advice in general for someone wanting to do a startup. Whether is it in technology or not?

As I also mentioned previously, it is important to be perseverant and also be motivated in the things that you are doing. You have to really have a passion for it or feel that it can really solve something that you felt needed to be solved. Then, you deliver something which hopefully will help others and not only you.

Do you have any advice for any, like a new engineer, that would like to come up with a startup?

I am not sure if I can give any advice. The one thing I would tell them is to get into something that they are passionate about. You have to really have a passion for it or feel that it can really solve something that you felt needed to be solved. This is because they will need to put all of themselves into this startup and they’ll really need to strive to achieve their goals.

There is no such thing as an easy startup, all the startups are complex.

So the fact that you like what you do can really help to boost and motivate you, and that is something that can solve an issue more efficiently. It is also important to have perseverance because sometimes, there are cases in which everything simply does not seem to be working, but then light can be seen again and everything goes on.

On the technological side, the one thing that I learned is that you need to go out as soon as you have something. It is important to collect feedback from others, from partners, and future customer. Personally, I was not like this when I was younger as in my mind everything had to be really perfect before having others to try it. But that is not the case, you should go out as soon as you can because there are things that you just cannot plan or predict. I still love precision and accuracy, which can be achieved at the next iteration of the development. And that is why I love working at 3Brain where our great team strive for perfection.

And here we come to another important thing of course, the team. Everything is made by the people you join hands with. It is first about having the right co-founders, with the right fit with your personality, as you will need them beside you on this long adventure. Then when you start to have more companions, you will need to pay attention to that. Sometimes the people you hire might not fit perfectly but it is okay because people come and leave. But you do need to find a strong team that buys into your vision and what you believe in and that constitutes your stronghold. You need that to go to the next level.

Innovator of the Month Interview with Diaxxo

Diaxxo AG is a spin-off start-up from the Functional Materials Lab at ETH Zurich founded in 2020 by two young entrepreneurs, Dr Michele Gregorini and Philippe Bechtold, aspiring to revolutionize point-of-care diagnostics. They developed an innovative polymerase chain reaction (PCR) device, named peakPCR, based on years of research that is fast, portable yet efficient in performing high quality PCR. They believe that their technology, peakPCR, will help doctors identify and fight diseases faster. Having already validated their technology for COVID-19 detection, the company is now working on getting their devices certified and expanding their use in other diseases.

Left: Philippe Bechtold (CTO) Right: Michele Gregorini (CEO). Photo: ETH Zürich / Alessandro Della Bella

Innovator of the Month Interview with Michele Gregorini (Diaxxo’s CEO) by Paris Kosti (Innovation Forum Lausanne)

IF Lausanne (IFL): We have seen that you developed a small and portable PCR machine that performs PCR fast and reliably.

Michele: One and a half year ago I had to explain what PCR is and when it is used. Now with the COVID pandemic everybody knows what it is.

IFL: Could you tell us more about your technology?

Michele: PCR itself is an established technology, it was invented several years ago. The main problem of current PCR systems is that conventional instruments are rather big and slow. You can process a high number of samples but it takes 1 to 2 days before you actually get the results. So what happens in practice is that the doctor sends the sample (the swab sample for example) to the laboratory; then there is a technician who processes the samples, loads and starts the machine. Then, you allow 2 hours for the reaction and after that you have to process the results and communicate back to the doctor (probably a day or two after) and finally the doctor interprets the results and informs the patient.

What we want to do is to bring the whole analysis to the point-of-care setting. The goal is to transform the conventional sample analysis process so that you go to the doctor, they take a swab sample and then they run the experiment and analysis directly on the spot. Within more or less 20 minutes the doctor has the PCR results in hand, interprets them and directly makes the diagnosis.

We can achieve that with our device which is portable, autonomous, fast and yet efficient. Our technology lies on modifying the reagents and preloading them in dried form in the machine chip. Also, our material allows for fast temperature cycling and thus shortens the overall reaction time. You can test multiple pathogens at the same time; for example, now we have developed a cartridge for COVID-19 that can test simultaneously for several variants of concern in a short time. Other cartridges can be used to test for Chlamydia and Gonorrhea or in general for up to 7 different diseases.

Michele Gregorini using *peakPCR*. Photo: ETH Zürich / Alessandro Della Bella

IFL: Do you have any competitors and how does your technology differ from theirs?

Michele: There are other point-of-care PCR machines out there, GeneXpert to name one, but what makes us special is that with our technology we can perform PCR really fast (20 minutes, even 10 minutes for some applications) for a very low cost with a non-microfluidic cartridge which is very easy to produce, very easy to scale up and that does not need any cold chain –so we are still somehow unique in all the point-of-care features that we have.

IFL: At what stage are you currently at in terms of securing IP and what did you protect?

Michele: We have currently two patent applications running. The first relates to our sample holder for the detection of 2 of the most tested STIs simultaneously, Chlamydia and Gonorrhea, and the cartridge itself, together with the way of loading the reagents. The second IP is on a different type of cartridge that we want to use for digital PCR where you get absolute quantification of genomic material present, which is really important for example for malaria or HIV.

IFL: Did you have any experience in the past with startups or this is your first attempt? Have you always wanted to start a company or is it something that came about by doing your PhD research?

Michele: This is my first company but our professor advisor is more experienced and has more entrepreneurial experience. Well yes – it came out of my research study as a part of my PhD.

I think what is really great in starting a company is to create value and that gives you satisfaction. With a company you create jobs, you create new products and this is something really motivating.

I really love what we are doing because I think that diagnostics should be available for everybody and everywhere. But I love even more the fact that we are creating new technologies/designs that never existed before and this is a true driver for me.

IFL: Could you tell us about your team –how did you select the right people and what are the dynamics in the team?

Michele: I will start with a short story. There are a lot of startup trainings and in the first one I did one of the first things that I heard is that “The team is everything”. Back then I was thinking “yes but come on… we need to make the product first” and I was focused on the technical aspect.

Today after 1 year or so in business I think the team is absolutely everything. There is nothing else that matters more.

It is indeed really important and we are lucky we formed a great team with diverse expertise and characters, yet they perfectly fit together. After doing the selection we invited successful candidates to come to the workplace to see if we can work well together and if they like the atmosphere.

Also through great collaborators that we have, we managed to ship our device to several locations in Africa for testing Schistosoma in more than 10,000 children.

We value the friendly atmosphere amongst us and we also organize activities together like games and hikes.

With your team it is also very important to have a common goal—and I think we do.

We also have great advisors both from academia and industry and that really helps.

IFL: How do you see the future of your company?

Michele: Currently we are working towards design freeze of the final product components in order to certify our technology in 2022-2023 and then access the medical device market. In parallel we are building collaborations in Africa and we want to develop test kits for dengue, malaria, and other tropical diseases in countries where there is really a strong need. This work is financed also by the Botnar Research Centre for Child Health and the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP). In order to gain faster access to the diagnostics market we are also happy to consider partnerships and join our forces to expand the adoption of our technology.

IFL: How supportive do you think the Swiss ecosystem is to build a startup?

Michele: To be honest I feel extremely lucky. I had the opportunity to study at ETH, which is really a world-class institution, and when I started building the company I received support from several institutions of the Swiss Start-up ecosystem. There is a lot of funding for early stage startups and we were able to access substantial financial resources –already more than half a million in non-dilutive funding from different sources such as the ETH Pioneer Fellowship, SNF-BRIDGE from the Swiss National Science Foundation and Innosuisse, as well as private foundations. There are plenty of programs, trainings, workshops, competitions.

IFL: Personally what did you gain from the experience of starting up your own company? What is one thing that you underestimated before starting your company, but in the end proved to be crucial in the process?

Michele: I come from a technical background and now, all of a sudden, I am dealing with Business Development, Human Resources and Public Relations. What I am really gaining is all the business expertise. Also dealing with a team requires different kinds of skills. You have to be good on the technical level because you want to communicate well with your team or work together on the same problem, but you also have to consider that we are people with different problems and different backgrounds, and therefore you have to be able to connect and have empathy. I think it really helps if you are on the same line with the team and have the same goal.

In the beginning you think you have to work only on the technology but no – you need to focus on the business as well and make sure you are developing the right technology for the right application.

You have to really think about who is going to use your product.

Otherwise, the biggest risk that I always see is that you develop the best product in the world that nobody uses and that nobody wants to buy.

IFL: What would be your advice for the wanna-be entrepreneurs out there or people who are thinking of making the step to start a company?

Michele: If you want to start a company and have the idea of what you want to build, build it quickly – put together whatever you can – and go talk to people, talk to the potential users of your technology and get feedback.

Because the feedback that you get from people really drives the development of your product.

The opposite, building it until it’s perfect because you are a bit afraid of showing it, doesn’t help you. You burn money, you burn resources. By iterating as quickly as possible on the feedback you receive, you really grow your product/idea.

Michele Gregorini Photo: ETH Zürich / Alessandro Della Bella

Innovator of the Month Interview with Fastree3D

Innovator of the Month Interview by Hugo Cui.

Fastree3D is an innovative startup developing fast, three-dimensional imagers operating at the limits set by quantum physics. Launched in 2014 as an EPFL/TU-Delft spin-off, the company, based in Switzerland, is led by Claude Florin, CEO. Fastree3D’s sensors’ low latency, resilience to interferences, and software-defined control enable implementations ranging from smart cars to automated industrial vehicles. They prevent collisions by monitoring the distance and motion of surrounding objects with high confidence.

Could you tell us more about your imagers and how they improve on other existing LiDAR sensors on the market?

Fastree3D’s mission is to develop the fastest, safest, and smartest 3D LiDARs¹ imaging sensors. We push the limits of our detectors in these three directions. The latency of our sensors is of the order of ten milliseconds, which enables a car to brake in time when a pedestrian appears within a few meters. The safety parameter results from monitoring motion and directions, for thousand points in the scene, better than single-beam radars, while performing statistical quality control of every measurement in real time. Thirdly, our sensors display smart integration with vision pipelines driven by edge computing. Optimizing on-chip the detections results in effective sensor fusion, object recognition, or trajectory forecasting. Our sensors also benefit from cost-effective semiconductor manufacturing.

Fastree3D’s mission is to develop the fastest, safest, and smartest 3D LiDARs imaging sensors

I understand that Fastree3D is mainly targeting the urban traffic safety market. Are you addressing any other market segment?

We have indeed focused on city traffic safety, where fast and short-range detection is highly valuable. Several adjacent markets require similar capabilities. One example is autonomous industry robots and vehicles (AGVs²) used in many industries and evolving towards safer human-robot collaboration. Safety is equally important as there are as many forklift work accidents as pedestrian injuries in city traffic. As our system-on-chip³ product is software-defined, we can adjust these parameters to address different use cases.

Do you already have some engagements or prospects with car manufacturers to integrate your technology in smart cars?

Our market deployment pace follows game-changing technology progress at EPFL. The intuitive idea that you could measure distances with a “Flash LiDAR”, just as you perform flash photography with your phone, required solving multiple technical challenges. This year we reached a demonstrator functional in a city street environment.

Rather than integrating our technology into vehicles by ourselves, we opted to engage with the automotive manufacturing supply chain, performing over the last three years joint R&D with leading Tier-1 or Tier-2 companies such as Bosch and NXP. We offer them our components and they supply system solutions to automotive OEMs⁴. Our objective is to start producing a system-on-chip in 2022 that will then integrate into vehicle systems.

Is there any chance we will find Fastree3D’s technology in self-driving cars in the near future?

The automotive industry has defined an automated driving roadmap “ADAS⁵” featuring five levels. We now focus on level 2+, which takes corrective actions such as automated emergency braking. Level 5 self-driving cars are forecasted to be commercially available within ten years. Such delay is necessary to improve the full pipeline, from detection sensors (LiDARs, cameras, radars) to processing steps (scene segmentation, object tracking, cloud maps…). Over 250 companies are advancing various solution components. Fastree3D’s flash LiDAR contributes to an efficient pipeline, for example, with adaptive edge computing. We foresee contributing to highly automated vehicles in six to ten years, initially for specific models such as shuttle buses, last-mile delivery, or truck platooning.

Could you tell us how Fastree3D was born?

Key people and my own emotions played a role. I met in 2012 Prof. Charbon (EPFL), who is an incredible scientist in the field of single-photon detection⁶ (SPAD) with startup experience that led to one of the first mass-market 3D camera (Kinect™⁷). To develop a time-of-flight measurement chip, we teamed up with the best expert in time-to-digital converters, Prof. Bogdan Stazewski⁸, then at TU-Delft. Combining a large array of SPADs with precise time-to-digital converters (TDCs) for outdoor applications was still a recent idea at the time. A personal emotional moment occurred when I lost my father hit by a car, on a city street, despite the low driving speed. I realized that 95% of traffic accident deaths or severe injuries affected pedestrians and cyclists, a quarter-million every year in Europe and North America.

But using LiDARs for cars was still a crazy idea, apart from DARPA research competitions using industrial-grade technology. Amid regular discussions, the Fastree3D’s technology concept was born (the name itself derived from “readout electronics”). Then, as is quite often the case, we went through cycles: we developed single-photon detectors, waited for the availability of powerful vertical-cavity lasers, integrated three generations of system demonstrators. Overall it took five years.

Could you tell us more about your team?

We are still a small team of ten people, starting with Prof. Charbon (CSO) and Lucio Carrara (CTO). Over the years, a multi-disciplinary team has been built: analog and digital circuit designers, laser specialists. Personally, my past business and technical career was not in semiconductors but always close to digital imaging and signal processing: I contributed to design, in my early career, new and affordable digital radiology systems for Philips Healthcare and later, with HP Labs, innovative mobile phone services by processing video.

It is exciting to see new team members attracted by the same combination of challenges and application promises. Whenever I greet a candidate, I remind him we work on a “mission impossible.” We need to combine our skills to implement trade-offs among constraints such as laser eye-safety, optics, algorithms optimization, low power time measurement. Our CSO helps us approach the limits set by quantum physics, and the team pushes the functional boundaries by adding digital processing blocks and optical components. We also benefit from experienced advisors who successfully faced similar issues in other Companies.

How do you picture Fastree3D in five years?

In terms of business, we hope to see these sensors for cars and robots becoming pervasive. We are at the forefront of the most scalable version of LiDARs ready for manufacturing in a million units. The sensor is software-defined so that other developers can integrate it within their toolkits or vision processing pipelines. Our system-on-chip hides the physics complexity and makes it an easy-to-use component that can be widely adopted.

We are at the forefront of the most scalable version of LiDARs ready for manufacturing in a million units. Our system-on-chip hides the physics complexity and makes it an easy-to-use component that can be widely adopted.

Our project also justifies expanding the team for growth to about thirty people. We could benefit from more talents to address new application domains. As the product relies on multiple photonics and computing technologies, it fosters a culture of continuous innovation. We also foresee that the company may join a bigger industrial group, allowing it to address much larger innovation challenges, as it happens to many startups.

How did the Swiss innovation ecosystem help Fastree3D’s development and growth?

Like many tech startups, we spun-off from the alma-mater, in our case, EPFL’s advanced quantum architecture Lab⁹. We could build upon a decade of research but still had to transfer this into a proof of concept product. EPFL licensed foundation patents provided access to early prototypes of a Ph.D. student, Samuel Burri, which led to SPIE awards, the world’s largest photonics society, and conference organizer. We designed new circuits for our second generation prototype and built the camera with BFH Fachhochschule, Prof. Dr. Theo Kluter, under an InnoSuisse grant. We were top finalists in several startup awards (>>venture, Top100, Bilan magazine, MassChallenge), which helped to obtain Seed financing, for instance, from Venture Kick. As we started industrial cooperation in the Netherlands, we observed that Switzerland offers support comparable to leading high technology regions in Europe. What is impressive is the continued progress of the EPFL and Swiss photonics industry during the same period. This year, EPFL demonstrated a 4D camera capturing 24,000 images per second and approaching one mega-pixel 3D detectors¹⁰. That has attracted the world’s attention, and we benefit from new technology transfer opportunities.

What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs among EPFL (but not only) students?

It starts with knowing and adapting to your character. For a significant innovation or technology transfer, it often takes more time than you initially think: your original plan needs to be multiplied by three or four. During the start period, you will face a lot of rejections and face moments of doubt. My first advice for becoming an entrepreneur is to keep the stubbornness you had as a little boy or a little girl, when your mother told you “don’t do it,” and you still did it. That’s very much the spirit needed to pursue (apparently) crazy ideas. There will be many people advising you against it. It’s not that you don’t listen to them: you may even think they’re right, but you can balance if the bet is worth trying. It requires a “leap of faith” that is reasoned and sustained in time.

It requires a “leap of faith” that is reasoned and sustained in time.

My second advice is that you need close friends sharing your vision, much more than you need business plans and financing. Friends are the beginning of a team and, in our case, helped our communication to convince others about the innovation. Friends are also found among entrepreneurs, such as those illustrated by Innovation Forum Lausanne. With a bit of stubbornness and good friends, real entrepreneurs pursue their goals despite adverse advice and then attract successful other people around them along the way.

¹Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is a method for measuring distances (ranging) by illuminating the target with laser light and measuring the reflection with a sensor.

²Automatic guided vehicle (AGV) are mobile robots used in industrial applications such as warehousing or manufacturing but also hospitals and more recently for last-mile delivery of parcels.

³A System-on-Chip (SoC) is an integrated circuit (“chip”) that integrates most components of a computer. These include a central processing unit (CPU), memory, input/output ports and detection or signal processing– all on a single microchip, the size of a coin.

⁴Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are companies intervening later in the automative value chain and integrating components provided by Tier-1,2 companies.

⁵Automated driving assistance systems (ADAS) are categorized based on five levels of automation. For example, in level 2 the driver performs most of the decision making but can be assisted by multiple aids including autonomous obstacle avoidance, and autonomous parking. At level 5, the vehicle is fully autonomous but such systems have not yet been embedded in commercial vehicles.

⁶Single-photon avalanche diodes (SPAD) are semi-conductor photodetectors, from the family of photodiodes. When implemented with an appropriate “reverse bias” voltage the impact of one of few photons triggers an “avalanche” current. This enables very fast and efficient light detection, a property that is essential in LiDAR. SPADs can also be manufactured in the same CMOS processes used in image sensors, enabling high resolutions and implementation of digital processing techniques.

⁷Professor Charbon was the chief architect of Canesta Inc., the creator of the Kinect™ 3D camera for consumer applications and human-computer interfaces. In 2002 the Canesta released a CMOS-based single chip 3D sensor implementing SPAD detection and phase de-modulation (US US6580496B2 patent by Edoardo Charbon and Cyrus Bamji). Microsoft acquired Canesta in 2010 and switched it’s Kinect™ 3D camera to this technology, initially for gaming and later for applications in robotics and healthcare. By 2017 35 million units had been sold, making it a pervasive 3D vision technology.

⁸R. Bogdan Staszewski co-started and led the Digital RF Processor group at Texas Instrument and has a unique expertise in nanoscale CMOS architectures. At TU-Delft he designed 20-picosecond time-to-digital converter (TDC). He is also a co-founder Equal1 Labs, a startup building single-chip CMOS quantum computer.

⁹Advanced Quantum Architecture Laboratory (AQUA) develops technologies in the fields of optical sensing, including single photodetection, as well as in embedded quantum hardware. https://www.epfl.ch/labs/lmsc/qct/research/aqua/

¹⁰MegaX is extremely fast and can take up to 24,000 images per second; in comparison, movies are filmed at 24 images per second. Achieving high-resolution up to 1 megapixel expands the potential toward novel applications in microscopy, automotive, and 3D robotics. EPFL holds the current record at 512×512.

Innovator of the Month Interview with Novigenix

Innovator of the Month Interview by Davide Coda and Gian Franco Piredda.

Novigenix is an innovative Swiss molecular diagnostics company specialising in new generation blood tests for early detection of cancer and precision medicine. Founded in 2013, by a group of three scientists from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the company is currently led by Dr. Jan Groen, who was appointed CEO in May 2019. The technology at the core of Novigenix is a blood immune-transcriptomic sequence platform which measures changes in the expression of genes that are being transcribed by peripheral blood immune cells. Through the application of artificial intelligence, Novigenix can identify distinct “signatures” for how the immune system as a whole is responding to a given tumour or disease condition. This information can later be used for cancer detection, disease progression and therapy selection.

Tell us more about immuno-transcriptomic sequencing and how the technology developed by Novigenix works?

Our company focus is oncology. There are two signals that can be used to detect the presence or absence of cancer: tumour-derived signals and immune-signals. The former is mostly represented by proteins and/or DNA/miRNA molecules released by the cancer into the bloodstream; the second one acts as the “police force” which promptly responds to dangerous events happening in our body. Immune-transcriptomic is all about the immune-signals. At Novigenix we look at the presence of specific white blood cells – monocytes and/or macrophages – during the early development of colon cancer. Our technology implies taking a blood sample from a healthy individual, isolating these white cells, and sequencing their mRNA molecules. Since we have previously identified which mRNA molecules are expressed by the white cells in the presence of cancer using an artificial intelligence algorithm, we are now able to discern whether the individual we took the blood sample from does or does not have colon cancer. At the moment, in the Swiss market, we are selling a product called Colox, which comprises the signature of 29 specific colon cancer genes that we have identified and turned into a RT-qPCR test, a technique used to measure the amount of a specific RNA.

Do you plan to apply your technology to the diagnosis of other types of cancer?

Every different stage and type of cancer comes with a specific immune-signal pattern. Our platform LITOseek – Liquid Immune Transcriptomic sequencing – can potentially cover types of cancer and different stages, such as melanomas, breast and bladder cancer. However, this newly developed platform has proven to perform significantly better than anything else on the market specifically when applied to early stage detection of colon cancer.

Do you think other types of biological samples could give you similar results, saliva for example?

Yes, saliva would indeed be the ideal specimen. Although blood sampling is generally perceived as a non-invasive procedure, some people consider it pretty scary. In addition, it also requires patients to go to hospital, and trained personnel need to collect your blood. For these reasons, saliva would be the best way forward, being less invasive and enabling home testing. However, the main drawback is that the quality and quantity of immune cells present in saliva is lower compared to blood. Nonetheless, we are currently working on the development of an extraction protocol in order to collect enough mRNA from the immune cells present in saliva. Once we have optimised an extraction protocol, we will focus on this solution to come up with a valuable product to bring to market.

I guess you work with big and personal data, how are you handling data-security issues?

In all cases, patients are the owners of their data and they can agree to provide it to the company under the umbrella of an informed consent form. We store the data in an anonymized way, and we only keep records of some basic information such as clinical symptoms, age and gender. At any time, the patient can have their data back or ask for their data to be destroyed. Interestingly, we recently did a small market survey and we learnt that most healthy individuals and patients are very willing to donate their data, which is great news from a research perspective!

Which market segments are you addressing?

Our company is focusing on colon cancer, which is a very big market. Screening for colon cancer is a hot topic, both in Europe and the US. The most widely used test at the moment is a stool-based test. Obviously, it is a very cheap test, but it’s not very sensitive or specific. Any other test like a blood test will be much more sensitive, but will most likely be more expensive. In Europe, the problem you face when you want to introduce a new screening test on the market is that you have to convince the government of each country within the European Union to do that. From a government perspective, a new test means a big upfront investment, and it takes many years to measure the overall cost reduction for the healthcare system. At the moment, we are selling Colox in Switzerland via Unilabs that offers it to their customers, but the ultimate goal would be to sell it directly to hospitals, government institutions and large commercial labs. Most hospitals labs have sequencing capabilities in house and they know how to extract mRNA from blood cells. We will eventually provide them with a completely validated workflow.

What is the goal of your company over the next 5 years?

We have three main goals to achieve. First, we are in the process of validating our LITOseek platform for patients with colon and other types of cancer; once this step is done we plan to expand from detection to the monitoring of patients being treated for cancer. For this specific goal, we have recently signed an agreement with a medical centre in the Netherlands. Our second goal is to work on neuroendocrine cancers in collaboration with the pharma company RadioMedix, with whom we also signed an agreement. The third goal, as said before, is to look at what can we do with saliva samples from an R&D point of view.

Can you tell us more about your team?

We are a very small team. This is related to the fact that we don’t manufacture anything; we are more like a highly sophisticated R&D group with a very strong medical team. Today we have about 10 people in the company, mostly split between R&D, regulatory and finance teams. At the moment we don’t have a commercial team, as we delegate such tasks to third parties.

How has your personal experience been so far leading Novigenix over the past 7 months? Do you need to have a detailed scientific background?

I have been CEO of several companies in my career, and three of them were developing diagnostic products in oncology. I moved from the US to Switzerland to work for Novigenix, because of their unique technology: I think immune-transcriptome is quite intriguing, and because of the attractiveness from a commercial perspective, no one outside academia is doing something similar to us. I believe these types of small biotech companies (i.e. science based) really need a CEO with a strong scientific background: e.g. if you are a CEO with a financial background you will need to surround yourself with lots of people to aid your understanding of the technology and support with decision-making. Instead, it is much easier to have a good knowledge of your company’s main product and hire experts in accounting to help you run the company. Indeed, I’m not an oncologist myself, I’m a medical microbiologist, but at the end of the day whether it’s viruses or cancer cells we’re talking about, it’s all about RNA and DNA!

Do you have any suggestions for students interested in developing their own ideas?

Dedication! There are lots of programs available today to get you started and for a start-up finding seed funds is not a problem, but my advice would be to first test the market by talking to lots of people to see if your idea is a valuable one. Ask them if there truly is a market and if they see the value of your idea, before taking it to the next phase. Then, once you have leveraged your idea, it is important to form a group of believers around you; people that are dedicated and focused. Whatever it is that you’re developing, end users should see the value in it, and in the case of therapeutic or diagnostic applications end users are doctors or patients. If they don’t see the value of your idea, you will never commercialise it successfully!

Innovator of the Month Interview with CompPair

Innovator of the Month Interview by Gianmarco Gatti and Alvaro Charlet.

CompPair is an up and coming Swiss startup led by Amaël Cohades, developing composite materials with healable and recyclable properties. The company was born as a spin-off of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and its mission is to increase the lifetime of composite parts, reducing their costs and environmental footprint. The technology, developed at the Laboratory for Processing of Advanced Composites (LPAC) led by Véronique Michaud, can heal microcracks, which are at the root of fatal failures of composite materials, simply by heating them to moderate temperatures. CompPair products are textiles which have been pre-impregnated with this special technology, with the aim of producing full part applications. Scale up has already been demonstrated with various prototypes.

Can you tell us what composite materials are and how does your technology work?

Composite materials are for example glass, carbon or natural fiber textiles, where each layer is superimposed on top of the other. These layers are then consolidated by impregnating them with resin, so that the final output is a composite material made of fibers and resin. With this process, the materials can reach high structural mechanical properties while still remaining a lot more lightweight than metals. Therefore, applications are plenty: from sport and sailing, to transportation and windmills. However, there are some drawbacks: these materials are in fact really sensitive to damage and their restoration is complicated and costly. In addition, due to the complexity of the process and the high cost it requires, these materials are almost not recycled.

From the early 2000s, some people started to think about ways to make these materials healable. The main problem is that the superimposition of many layers prevents access to the damage. No efficient strategy was found to treat the damage without dramatically reducing the mechanical properties of the material and/or being competitive for a commercial application.

Five years ago, Professor Véronique Michaud decided to adopt another strategy for self-healing composites research in her laboratory. Heating moderately the composite up to 150°C should be enough to start the recovery reaction, without affecting the good mechanical properties at room temperature. I dedicated four years of my PhD research to this project and after many unsuccessful trials, we finally understood how to reach efficient healing of composites using heat together with mechanical properties similar to commercial systems. After additional research, our tests were working exactly as expected and we realized we had something very interesting: a composite with healable properties, competitive mechanical properties and with easy recyclability. Once the technology was patented, I decided to develop the project into a startup.

How do the diagnostics of composite materials work and how do you know if it requires healing?

Diagnostics, as well as healing, depend on the sector you are working in. In particular, there are three main cases: cyclic damage, preventive regeneration and safety in critical applications. In the first case, you have a part where you get cyclic damage, which means that you know how often you should heal your material. The prevention case is related to the use of your material instead. Let’s say you use your mountain bike for a day of downhill racing. You know there’s a high chance of having microcracks, since you could hit a rock for example; so you just preventively heal your material using a hair dryer in the evening in your garage for a couple of minutes. In the third case, which involves safety critical applications, like airplanes and windmills, there are established non-destructive techniques to scan the part for any cracks to see the damage directly. Now, once you find the damage, for instance in a windmill blade, you just need to locally heat the material to remove the cracks.

What market segments will you be addressing?

In principle, we could target any segment where composites are already being used. The beauty of our system is that we can implement it onto any fiber system, glass, carbon and natural fibers. We also have the capacity to slightly change the chemistry to adapt to all client needs. However, at the moment, we are focusing on marine and sports, but in the future we want to reach also the windmill, aerospace and automotive industries.

Do you have any competitors in this field?

There is rarely a new technology without competitors. But it is true, we are the first ones to have this additional feature on the market. However, we do have competitors, which are the big well-established semi product composite material producers. Nevertheless, we do have our technology as a key competitive advantage in our favor.

What kind of support did you receive from EPFL, or other mentorship programs here on campus?

We quickly realized we needed a prototype to show the working principles of our healable composites. Thanks to the support of the ENABLE program of EPFL in summer 2018 we managed to develop our model [the dome-shaped part in the figure, which is typically used in the aerospace industry]. Later on, I applied for coaching at EPFL Innovation Park, and then continued to get great support from the LPAC laboratory. After that, we won the first stage of Venturekick in February 2019. In June 2019, we then received an Innogrant from the EPFL Vice Presidency for Innovation and an InnoBooster, from the Gebert Rüf Foundation. Therefore, we secured enough funding for an additional year, but if we want to scale-up the production we will certainly need additional resources.

You are speaking at the Innovation Forum Lausanne Annual Conference, can you give us a sneak-peak and tell us how your application is more sustainable than traditional composite materials?

There are two key aspects: firstly, we can increase the lifetime of our parts, which dramatically reduces CO₂emissions and the environmental footprint of the application. Secondly, CompPair’s mission is to provide long-term, full circularity, of the material: unlike most traditional composite materials, we can easily separate the resin from the fibers, thus greatly increasing the recyclability of the composite part.

Can you tell us more about your team?

We are expanding quite quickly! On the technical side, Robin Trigueira, Co-founder, takes care of product development, proof of concept, demonstrations and pilot testing. Cecilia Scazzoli, is finishing her Masters, and writing her thesis related to the product we will be launching. She will continue with us early next year. On the business development side, there is Bertille D’Agay and Nicolas Gandar, who I met at the InnoSuisseBusiness Concept course. They take care of finance, sales, marketing and management. I am supervising the whole project. Prof. Véronique Michaud continues to support us with many different aspects, from science, to product, and industry. In addition, we are being well advised by experts! Also, many students are linked to the projects, which helps to boost our venture! We are quite a big team already, but complement each other well and get along well together.

Right now I’m working on obtaining a seed round from March up to Summer 2020, to be ready for when we will have the beta version of our product by the end of 2019 and to welcome our first customers in early 2020.

How has your personal experience been so far leading CompPair over the past year?

It is really demanding, but I love it. When you do 4 years of research and you suddenly see a spot for integrating it into a real commercial application, well, that’s the dream. Even if I had other great things that awaited me after the PhD, I knew that if I had left such a great opportunity, I would have always regretted it.

Do you have any suggestions for the next entrepreneur in Material Science?

At this point, I need to thank my research advisor, Véronique Michaud. She is an incredible scientist. She always told us that in addition to doing deep science, we should be able to upscale our system to meet industry requirements. We can process samples at a research level but with industrial relevant processes. My suggestion is: always think in terms of applications, even if you don’t immediately see it in your research, because you never know what you might reach in the future.

Innovator of the Month Interview with Nagi Bioscience

Innovator of the Month Interview by Andrea Di Russo and Lorenzo Di Sopra

Nagi Bioscience is an EPFL spin-off start-up introducing the first Organism-on-Chip technology. Nagi Bioscience’s technology is based on the use of “Caenorhabditis elegans” (C. elegans) as a biological model organism and, for the first time, it allows its use for in vivo testing in a fully automated in vitro handling, culture and analysis format. This start-up aims to open new possibilities in toxicity testing and drug discovery. Today, we will talk about the contribution that Nagi Bioscience could bring to innovation in drug and chemical testing together with the CEO Matteo Cornaglia.

Hello Matteo! Let’s start from the beginning: how was Nagi Bioscience born?

It all started as a within-EPFL collaboration between the two company co-founders (Laurent Mouchiroud) and myself (Matteo Cornaglia, ed) from an actual need in EPFL life science laboratories to automate C. elegans research and testing. C. elegans is a very popular model organism in biomedical research, a microscopic worm widely used in several fields, from developmental biology to aging research. This worm has now become the superstar of our startup! Although widely used, in fact, the main issue faced by most of the laboratories around the world is that everything has to be done manually. Thus, the idea was to combine C. elegans research with microfluidic technology to firstly automate current laboratory experiments, and secondly to open new possibilities for industrial applications.

Was C. elegans used only for research purposes until now?

Not exactly: there are various companies already using – or currently evaluating the use of – C. elegans, among which are large groups in the chemical, cosmetic, and pharma/biotech industries. However, the gold-standard is still to employ manual techniques. Therefore, our goal is to provide a new tool to standardize, automate, and enable new possibilities to get unprecedented throughput and ways of testing.

What does the name “Nagi Bioscience” stand for?

It’s an acronym for Nature’s Gift to (bio)Science, which is also the title of the Nobel award’s speech of Sydney Brenner, the scientist who introduced C. elegans in biomedical research. The name is dedicated to the worm itself: created by Nature and becoming a more and more precious “gift” for science. It is indeed a very convenient scientific tool today, because it is a relatively simple organism with a well-defined number of cells and ability to self-fertilize, its genome is fully encoded and it is even possible to observe complex processes occurring in its cells through a simple optical microscope, thanks to its transparency and genetic amenability.

What are the expertise that you have (or you look for) in your group? Is the PhD degree usually a requirement?

As for most start-ups, one skill is definitely not enough, you need a very complementary team to succeed. I believe we are a great example of multi-disciplinary team: when we started, I brought the microtechnology-related knowledge for the microfluidic aspects, while Laurent has a strong background in biology, with more than 12-years expertise in C. elegans research. The other fundamental skills that we then included in our core team were in the domain of robotics and software development. This is the good mix of key competencies that make the whole project possible today: if you take one out, things may get really difficult indeed. Recently, we have moreover started working with other experts for the design and the user experience of our device; in fact, the current goal is to move to external beta testing of our next generation prototype. From the business development perspective, our next key hiring will be on the sales and marketing side, to help us to further develop the customer relationships we already built and to enrich our customer portfolio for sales of both pilot studies and future products. Regarding our degrees, 3 out of the 4 members of our core team have a PhD indeed. I think that, especially in the research and development phase, it is very interesting to work with people with a PhD profile, as it also provides a certain method and way to work which I find convenient in the startup environment.

What do you think is the best advantage brought by your technology? Is it the economic savings, the research possibilities that you are opening, or maybe the ethical aspect in helping reducing experiments on animals?

Nagi Bioscience’s best advantage is contained in our mantra: “In vivo testing at the in vitro scale”, which suggests that our innovation fills the gap between these two classes of testing methods. In particular, compared to standard in vitro testing, we are not working on isolated cells, organoids or tissues, but we encompass the complexity of a full organism. Regarding the in vivo aspect, then, our solution allows overcoming many issues of traditional animal testing, among which significantly reducing costs and time of the tests.

Are there any ethical problems with the use of C. elegans for research?

Nowadays the ethical aspects of drug and chemical testing are more and more important, and there is growing legal pressure in this respect: for example, in the cosmetics research field, animal testing is banned in Europe since 2013, and this is now spreading all over the world. C. elegans research has no constraints in this sense and there are valid scientific reasons for that: C. elegans is an invertebrate, does not have a central nervous system and it is considered a non-scenting organism. These scientific observations are translated into an official regulation with a directive from the European parliament stating that all invertebrates, except the cephalopods, are not protected in the framework of a scientific experiment, meaning that no justification needs to be provided for using this model organism.

Switching from science to entrepreneurship: what are the next goals from a business point of view?

This year we started pilot studies in all the target segments: testing of chemicals, cosmetics and pharma-biotech compounds. The goal is to execute these pilots together with the customers: currently, we have a fully operational prototype that basically works 24/7 and generates the data that we are going to discuss with our partners, aiming to tailor our product with them to their actual needs. The next steps will be to continue with the industrialization of our prototype, beta-test it with external users, and finally reach the CE-marking to put the product into the market. For all of this, of course, more financial and human resources will be needed. We currently have an open round of investment, which already attracted significant interest and that we aim to close in the next few months.

Do you have any competitors in your field? Are they startups or bigger companies? And do you have any specificity or advantage?

Having competitors is usually a confirmation that your idea is good, so, luckily, we have a few. In particular, a few other companies developing technologies for C. elegans-based drug/chemical screening exist. These competitors are all in the US, and 2 out of 3 started out of research groups like us. Their research was basically aligned with ours, so we can say we are among the pioneers in this C. elegans worm-on-chip technology, and the others are moving with us. Anyway, the big competitive advantage that we have is that we are the only ones so far that have managed to automate the whole C. elegans research process: our device allows culturing, treating and analyzing thousands of worms, all in the same device. This is key, for instance, for the execution of multiple bio-assays for drug toxicity and/or efficacy in the same machine and in a fully standardized and automated way, while competitors are already on the market with devices typically focusing on one specific type of analysis.

What do you think are the good aspects of having such a startup in the lemanic area?

For the bio- and med-tech field we believe that Lausanne is the place to be right now. Located in the heart of the “Health Valley”, in fact, Nagi Bioscience can rely on this favorable economic environment to develop its products, with major players in the food, chemical and pharma field around. We already established fruitful collaborations with companies around, as well as with academic labs at EPFL. In addition, there is a constellation of initiatives in the area to support young entrepreneurs, which bring invaluable advantages in term of financial support and coaching.

Basing on your experience, what would be your core advice to new entrepreneurs willing to bring innovation in the biomedical field?

Build a great multidisciplinary team and work hard towards a clear vision!

Innovator of the Month Interview with Neurosoft

Innovator of the Month Interview by Eleonora Borda and Claudia Bigoni

Last month, Innovation Forum Lausanne had the chance to sit and have a chat with Nicolas Vachicouras and Ludovic Serex, founder and co-founder of Neurosoft, winners of last edition’s IMAGINE IF! Accelerator and receiver of the Audience Prize along with Swoxid. Neurosoft develops soft electrode arrays for treating neurological diseases by recording or stimulating the brain, spinal cord or peripheral nerves. The combination of soft materials and stretchable electronics allows higher conformability, contrary to the rigid systems currently used in clinics, and provide better biointegration for long-term applications.

Hello Nicolas, you just finished your PhD, but already last year you pitched your technology at the European Venture Program Pitch Battle; when did you start thinking that you could be a scientist entrepreneur? Was it just an opportunity or a dream?

Nicolas: Since high school, I have always liked the idea of interfacing the human body with technologies, but it was upon my arrival at EPFL ten years ago that everything really started. I began by joining the microengineering program and then pursued various projects in the laboratories of the Center of Neuroprostethics during my Master’s. A key step in my path was a summer internship at Aleva Neurotherapeutics, a startup developing implantable microelectrodes for deep brain stimulation. There, I understood how medical devices are developed at the industry level and I was lucky to get some advice to address my future PhD with a rather entrepreneurship-based vision from the start. Certainly, joining Prof. Lacour’s laboratory, doing pioneering work in the field of neural implants, helped me a lot on the scientific side. Overall, everything I did was part of a strategy to prepare the pathway towards building a startup while learning as much as I could.

How did you build your team? What kind of people are necessary to bring forward such a translational technology?

Nicolas: You need someone you already know you can work with, someone you can trust and that has both the capabilities and the motivation. I met Ludovic during my Bachelor’s and we have worked together on various projects ever since. Florian Fallegger, third co-founder, also joined us early on, as I also had the chance to experiment working together while being involved in the same project during our PhDs in Prof. Lacour’s group. The evolution from colleagues to forming a team was smooth and natural: we did an initial contest together and then the current team was formed.

Neurosoft took part in the IMAGINE IF! Competition, what did this experience mean for you and how does it feel to be chosen as the best startup not only by the jury but also by the audience?

Nicolas: Taking part in IMAGINE IF! gave us the chance to practice explaining our idea in a simple manner even if our topic is extremely specific. Finding an effective way to explain your idea quickly and simply to reach people with different backgrounds is an extremely important exercise.

Ludovic: Winning the first prize as well as the audience prize was motivating: we could see that our project is not only for the niche of our scientific community, but it is also interesting for people in other fields.

What are you expecting from the experience of participating at the global finals of IMAGINE IF!?

Nicolas: Having the possibility to showcase our project in an international conference and competition is a great opportunity. Indeed, we have been in the comfort zone of EPFL for almost ten years now and thus, we have had little exposure to the outside environment. With the global mentorship program and the following pitching competition, we want to gather more feedback from people who base their opinions only on the project, with no strings attached.

In what aspects does your solution distinguish itself from other products on the market?

Nicolas: The key aspect regards the mechanical properties of our implant: softness, conformability and stretchability. Moreover, having all these properties on a micrometer scale electrode is an important added value, thanks to which we can have a better biointegration and access to anatomical regions that could not be reached with a stiff implant. From a technical point of view, the shift from rigid to soft is not trivial and we already have patents protecting our technology. Another critical point lies in the fabrication process: we mainly use techniques from the semiconductor industry and only few manual steps. In this way, batch processes can be exploited to produce many implants for cheaper and more reliably.

How difficult is to go through the regulatory aspects for an implantable device?

Nicolas: It is really challenging, yet a necessary step for our product. Right now, we are putting most of our effort into the translation from research grade to medical grade materials, which are approved for human implantation. Because the required knowledge on regulatory affairs is so large, the best approach is to ask for help to experienced people and consultants. On the side, I also suggest taking some related courses and trainings (EPFL offers many good options).

During the Startup Champions Seed Night at EPFL in April, the secret questions asked to the finalists of the competition was ‘What keeps you awake at night?’ so we are curious to know what your answer would be!

Ludovic: He [Nicolas, ed] is capable of texting me late at night to inform me about any new possible opportunity for the startup. More generally, I think it’s the timeline for production: it can take up to 7 months to have a well-working setup with machines and materials – if something fails along the way, you have to rethink everything.

Nicolas: I would say various worries about the project: building a startup is like a roller-coaster: it is a sequence of ups and downs. It is actually quite similar to a PhD; but in this case, whether you will be able to continue working on the project is defined by your own capabilities and success to bring your product on the market. Moreover, being on time on the different schedules is critical, especially now that the competition in the field of neural implants is growing so fast. My state of mind is to be a ‘realistic optimistic’, but not naive.

Where do you see Neurosoft in 10 years?

Nicolas: At the moment, we are leaving various options open. Certainly, the critical point will be the decision between trying to keep growing to eventually be self-sustainable or making a partnership with other companies. From an optimistic point of view, in ten years we would like to be in the former case. However, growing a big company in Switzerland is quite hard: at the moment you don’t see many huge investments like in the USA, since investors here are generally more conservative. Our plan A is to try to grow while staying local, but we are open to any possibilities that the future might hold. We will do whatever is best for the company.

What is a piece of advice you would like to give to a ‘wanna-be’ entrepreneur?

Ludovic: There are a lot of opportunities in terms of funding, coaching and programs like IMAGINE IF! at EPFL and in Switzerland to grow your idea and develop a business. My advice is: leverage what EPFL (or ETHZ) and the Swiss government provides and look for people who are willing to help.

Nicolas: I have two pieces of advice: a rather cliché one is not to get demotivated from other people’s opinions. For me, my number one rule is that “if you really want to do something, you will find a way to make it work”. My second piece of advice is rather personal because this is what I did, although it differs from what people usually tell you: if you are lucky enough to know what you want to do early on, focus all your actions towards that goal from the beginning. In my opinion, this will allow you to grasp many more opportunities; this is how one can make his own luck.

Innovator of the Month Interview with Swoxid

Swoxid is a Swiss pre-launch start-up led by Endre Horváth, developing filters to sterilize water. Their innovative material based on titanium oxide is activated using sunlight, and requires no electrical power. The filters can be used in remote places, and require little maintenance. The Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) spin-off is aiming to have a social impact on low income communities, where access to clean water is key to improve life quality and reduce child mortality.

Hello Endre and Claude, can you tell us more about your story. How was Swoxid born?

We met in 2009, at the swimming club here in Lausanne, and thanks to this hobby both of us have previously experienced the visual clarity and water odor in many swimming pools and natural rivers, lakes in multiple countries. I had recently started my PostDoc here at EPFL, and Claude was a PostDoc in Mathematics. But the roots of the project started earlier. I started working on the main material, titanium oxide (TiO₂), during my Bachelor. The photocatalytic properties of TiO₂ powder is well known since the 70s, with more than 40 000 scientific publications. This wonderful material is present in many everyday items such as plastics, paint and paper as a white pigment, it protects our skin in sunscreen, is present in emerging solar cells, such as dye sensitized and perovskite solar cells, and even in some edibles such as marshmallow or M&Ms as a colorant and anti-cake agent. The world production reaches 9 million tons per year. However, our innovation comes from the shape of our TiO₂ particles. Unlike commonly used spherical particles, I have developed manufacturing methods to produce fibers of them, as well as upscaling the fiber’s production. Together with my colleagues and enthusiastic, talented students we have worked 10 years at EPFL on this process and during this time we envisioned the creation of Swoxid.

Can you tell us a bit more about the technology, and how the filtering panels work?

We first start by making a free-standing film out of the TiO₂fibers. Then we bake them together on a surface, to merge them into a mechanically robust mesh. This mesh has nanopores, small enough to avoid bacteria and other microorganisms to go through. Moreover, since TiO₂ is a semiconductor with an optical bandgap in the solar spectrum, when illuminated with light, energy is released. The released energy splits water molecules into free radicals. They can decompose organic material during their very short lifetime. By this mean, any surrounding algae, fungi, bacteria or virus gets cut down into small pieces that can go through the filter. These leftovers are harmless to humans, making the initially contaminated water drinkable once it goes through the filter. After the filter is fabricated, we place it between two glass slides, and a panel to hold it all together. We then only insert an inlet on one side, and an outlet on the other side, place the panel in the sun, and let the water run through the filter using gravity!

Do these filters ever clog or need to be changed?

Here is their great advantage! First of all, they decompose any organic materials that might clog it. Furthermore, since the material is a ceramic, it is resistant to organic solvents, acids etc. You can easily backwash the filter with vinegar or any other acidic solution, and it will appear as new! However, since the water quality varies a lot from region to region, we are currently testing our prototypes with samples from different natural water sources in South Africa aiming the determination of the sterilization efficacy of the Swoxid panels. These tests are possible thanks to several foundations and the Swiss African Research Cooperation. We also have two motivated students here on campus conducting experiments with water samples from the local river in Lausanne.

Do you know if you have any competitors?

We have mainly seen similar technologies in air filtering, such as nonwoven nanofibrous TiO₂ air-con filters prepared by electrospinning, but only few companies are tackling water filtering systems with this material. We are, of course, in direct competition with traditional water filtering methods. But we are aiming at a particular primary goal, which is social impact. According to the World Health Organization, worldwide, 780 million individuals lack access to improved drinking-water and each year diarrhoea kills around 525 000 children under five. A significant proportion of diarrhoeal disease can be prevented through safe drinking-water. We hope that this technology could help the poorest people living at remote places without safe and reliable water infrastructure. We can remove pathogens, like bacteria and viruses from their local water source, without the need of chemicals, electricity or boiling water.

A challenge in our project, is to define a new business model for such social applications in line with the targets of the United Nation Sustainable Development Goals. The people using the filters are our users, but can’t be our customers as they cannot afford such filters. Therefore, we are investigating less classical business models, as well as additional more lucrative ones, for example water filters for aquarium applications. Initial results show that we are able to filter out 40% more pathogens than the current state of the art commercial filters. This niche market enables us to demonstrate the viability of our technology, until we can apply it to other, bigger markets such as the food industry, air sterilization and wastewater treatment.

What did you learn in the process of creating a startup?

We are still in the process! Thanks to EPFL and the local ecosystem, we followed entrepreneurship trainings, and learned a lot on moving from our scientific engineering mindset, to a more entrepreneurial one. It is not just about the numbers, you also need to think about the product and how to present it in order to reach a broader audience. We enjoy the process of transforming basic research, into technologies that will actually help people. I see that as a dream of a scientist to work towards developing innovative products from promising results of basic science.

We recently participated in the ImagineIF competition at EPFL, which helped us evolve a lot. Beyond the coaching, we have also made many new contacts, that opened us doors to humanitarian organizations. It was a great leap forward for Swoxid!

What are your plans for the future?

We first need to establish a detailed validation of our prototype under different environments. This will enable to quantify how often the filters must be backwashed for example. We also want to hand-in the prototypes to more people that can test them, and make them as user-friendly as possible.

We hope, one day there will be statistics on the product, showing how many lives we can actually help. Even saving a single life would already be a great achievement for us!

Innovator of the Month Interview with LakeDiamond

LakeDiamond, a Swiss start-up led by Pascal Gallo, is leading the way for lab-grown ultra-pure diamonds. Their synthetic diamonds have numerous potential technological applications, beyond jewellery. Their custom-developed Micro-Wave Chemical Vapor Deposition reactors grow the highest quality diamond on earth, mono-crystals up to the centimetre in scale. The Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) spin-off is currently undergoing an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) to raise 60 million CHF, to expand its production capabilities to meet high market demand.

Hello Pascal, can you tell us a bit about your story. When did you envision that you could build a start-up based on the growth of diamonds?

It all started during my post-doc at EPFL where I was investigating ways to enhance laser power. One day, along with the lab leader, Eli Kapon, we realized that by putting diamonds in lasers we could dramatically enhance their power. Although the potential of this idea was great, we were missing the first raw material: extremely pure diamonds. It was at that point that we decided to
create them; it took us about 10 years of development to come up with a reactor in its industrial version suited to the mass production of diamonds, especially for photonic applications. Once we had the opportunity to grow diamonds, we realized that we could address several other applications beyond lasers.

Was the shift beyond laser applications a turning point for you, or is it still a core goal of LakeDiamond?

The main project within LakeDiamond is still focused on lasers, but we have started to diversify the applications. Behind each application there is a collaboration with a different research group at EPFL. For example, we are working on the development of micro mechanical gears for the watch industry. Also, as this may be the first association you make with a diamond, we grow some for jewellery applications, which are quite successful with millennials: the younger generations appreciate our sustainable production methods. A third application involves transistors. For the latter, we are collaborating with Prof. Elison Matioli (POWERlab). Finally, we are investing in the use of diamonds in quantum physics: due to the nitrogen vacancy centers in diamonds we can
actually measure extremely weak magnetic fields. With this power, we could do
cardiomagnetometry and brain imaging with sensitivities comparable to the best devices in the world and at a fraction of the cost.

LakeDiamond has now moved on from being just a start-up and for each new application we are creating small spinoffs with dedicated industrial partners. Currently we count partnerships for the more stable applications: laser drone industry, watches and jewellery. For the more scientific and technical applications (i.e. transistors and magnetic sensors), we are still in the research phase.

You are among the very first companies doing an ICO in Switzerland; can you tell us something about your experience?

Organizing an ICO is not straightforward. It is like organizing a small Initial Public Offering (IPO), especially in terms of budget and legal framework. However, the principle is completely different.

The main difference is ICO’s democratization, which is achieved by giving access to a much broader public. We are making a token representing one minute of production, which you can directly use to grow diamonds. Otherwise, you can use your token to have diamonds grown for a certain party, who will pay you for using your production time. It is like a cryptocurrency linked to our production time and it finances our production capacity and our research and development. I would say we’re being quite successful because we are distributed by Swissquote, a Swiss bank. This allows us to address normal people, even those who are not aware that cryptocurrency exists or how it works. You just log onto the Swissquote website and purchase our token as if it was a traditional share.

I would like to mention that organizing an ICO is very expensive, especially the legal framework. We would be very happy to share our business model with other start-ups that would also like to organize an ICO. We will share our knowledge free of charge because we think that it is a great way to raise money. The underlying technology is there. It’s an ERC20 token, based on Ethereum.

You announced a plan to keep the whole production in the Lausanne area. How important is this to you?

Maintaining production in Switzerland is actually cost favorable for us. The stability of the local infrastructure is key to successfully grow diamonds, which can take up to a month. We purchase our electricity from Romande Energie, that was produced from renewable resources.

Another good point for remaining in Switzerland is given by the proximity to EPFL where we collaborate with five research groups.

Furthermore, the global Swiss environment is really good for start-ups. First of all, you have access to a lot of investors, which is mainly my job, and this is a major plus when financing your start-up. In addition, being a start-up gives you economical and financial benefits. For example, we have a tax holiday, meaning that we don’t pay any taxes for five years with the possibility to extend this for another five years (see Service de la promotion de l’économie et de l’innovation du Canton de Vaud).

What about the early stages, maybe before even thinking of investors, were there people that helped you establish a good team?

It is very important to find someone knowledgeable in law, corporate law and finance, with a good track record in the industry. I was very lucky to meet my main associate Theopile Mounier (Chief Financial Officer) at a very early stage. I met him by chance, like most of my team actually; networking can help you a lot. I met my first investor on a plane. You need to pitch all the time. You never know who could be your next investor or associate!

https://twitter.com/LakeDiamond

https://www.linkedin.com/company/lakediamond/

Chats

What was the inspiration behind your idea and how was Limula born?

What market needs are you currently addressing?

Can you tell us a bit more about your technology?

Who are your competitors and how does your technology differ from theirs (e.g. Miltenyi Prodigy®, Lonza Cocoon® etc.)?

Considering that many startups fail, weren’t you afraid of failing (in the beginning)?

What are the most important lessons you learnt in the process of creating your start-up?

What, in your opinion, is the most important value an entrepreneur should have to succeed?

Where do you see Limula and yourself in the next 5-10 years?

How supportive was the Swiss ecosystem to build a startup?

Can you tell us more about your team?

What do you look for in future members?

What would be your advice for the wanna-be entrepreneurs out there/people who are thinking to make the step to start a startup company?

What is the origin of the name of the company?

Could you tell us more about the core technology used by the company?

What are the advantages of having the processing unit within the well where cells are cultured?

What were the challenges associated with a technology-centered startup?

Could you tell us more about how you improve your devices from one generation to another?

What’s the biggest difference between when you first started in a small team and now?

Would you like to say something to your team?

Advice in general for someone wanting to do a startup. Whether is it in technology or not?

Do you have any advice for any, like a new engineer, that would like to come up with a startup?

Innovator of the Month Interview with Michele Gregorini (Diaxxo’s CEO) by Paris Kosti (Innovation Forum Lausanne)

Could you tell us more about your imagers and how they improve on other existing LiDAR sensors on the market?

I understand that Fastree3D is mainly targeting the urban traffic safety market. Are you addressing any other market segment?

Do you already have some engagements or prospects with car manufacturers to integrate your technology in smart cars?

Is there any chance we will find Fastree3D’s technology in self-driving cars in the near future?

Could you tell us how Fastree3D was born?

Could you tell us more about your team?

How do you picture Fastree3D in five years?

How did the Swiss innovation ecosystem help Fastree3D’s development and growth?

What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs among EPFL (but not only) students?

Tell us more about immuno-transcriptomic sequencing and how the technology developed by Novigenix works?

Do you plan to apply your technology to the diagnosis of other types of cancer?

Do you think other types of biological samples could give you similar results, saliva for example?

I guess you work with big and personal data, how are you handling data-security issues?

Which market segments are you addressing?

What is the goal of your company over the next 5 years?

Can you tell us more about your team?

How has your personal experience been so far leading Novigenix over the past 7 months? Do you need to have a detailed scientific background?

Do you have any suggestions for students interested in developing their own ideas?

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