We are setting up Forty51 ventures, a Biotech venture fund, to fill an important gap that we see in the Central-Western region in Europe. While we see a high density of scientific and medical innovation, yet we do not see many true venture builders that can help translate such innovation.
Together with my colleagues I founded MUVON Therapeutics in October 2020. It is a Biotech Spin-off from the University of Zurich with the goal of developing and commercializing an autologous cell therapy for the regeneration of skeletal muscle tissue.
OptiChroniX develops myAVOS, a smartphone app placing patients and caregivers at the center that will deploy Personalized Digital Interventions to improve health literacy, medication non-adherence and clinical outcomes by addressing modifiable risk factors that suggest to prevent or optimize disease outcomes in Dementia through digital delivery of remote diagnostics, remote monitoring and remote interventions, a Human Centric Healthcare concept.
Avrion Therapeutics has been founded based on more than ten years of research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, in the labs of Dr. Bernard Schneider, Prof. Patrick Aebischer, former President of EPFL, and Prof. Brian McCabe.
After my PhD, I joined Serono International in Geneva (now part of Merck KGA) in Drug Development and Regulatory Affairs in the therapeutic fields of Growth, Metabolism and Cardiovascular Disease.
I founded Zoundream because of my daughter who was born in November 2017. It was difficult for us in the beginning. It was not only about sleep deprivation but also because we were never sure if things were normal, if she was okay.
I wanted to take on the challenge to help the company become a world leader in its specific niche of biometric technology alongside a team that I deem amazing – their can-do attitude, the great collaboration and above all, they are just nice people, as human beings.
We stumbled upon this. My business partner and I used to work as Investment Directors for a Family Office in Zurich which had assets in Ukraine. We got to know the country, the people and the potential based on some IT projects we had. Switzerland has a lack of IT developers and we have a network to a large pool of IT resources. We said let’s give it a try, let’s see how we can find customers.
On the one side it was entrepreneurship as well as the fascination to identify game changing companies with their respective technologies. And on the other side to guide them on their growth trajectory and successful market establishment.
I was not interested in academia nor big Pharma. I was really lucky because my Professor at Oxford, as I was finishing my PhD, was starting a spin-out company from the lab. I didn’t know that was even an option at the time. Whilst in the lab, I saw lawyers, investors and entrepreneurs around us. I liked what I saw from my bench as a PhD student.
