What spurred you to create AMYRA Biotech? Can you tell us more about the firm?
AMYRA began as a quest to validate a hypothesis I made several years ago based on a discovery published in a scientific journal. In other words, it began with an intuitive hunch that what I had chanced upon, could be the solution to a medical problem I didn’t even know all that much about at the time. In fact, no one did.
I’m referring to celiac disease and non-celiac gluten sensitivity, which are two immune pathologies triggered in a relatively large proportion of the western population by gluten consumption.
What I discovered was that two very specific and very unique enzymes, known as exopeptidases, were capable of cutting down proline rich peptides into single amino acids and dipeptides. Let me contextualise this.
Proline-rich peptides are also the peptides that occur in the physiological digest of gluten and are resistant to complete degradation in all human beings. Unfortunately, a certain percentage of the global population express genes that cause them to have an immune or auto-immune response to these peptides – known as gluten immunogenic peptides – and these immune responses give rise to celiac disease and non-celiac gluten sensitivity.
When I witnessed the potential of these two exopeptidases to synergistically destroy gluten immunogenic peptides, I bought the patent and created a company. Ever since, AMYRA has been dedicated to expanding its IP around these enzymes and pioneering safe and effective treatments for gluten-related disorders.
You are also the co-Founder of two other biotech companies – CanVirex and Esocap. Tell us more about them.
CanVirex is a company I founded with a colleague and friend, Prof. Dr. Dr. Guy Ungerechts, with whom I became intimately acquainted after my father got cancer. My father was one of those rare people who had never seen a hospital from the inside and when we found out he had cancer, he told us he was ‘ready to go’. There was no way he would have consented to a lengthy cancer treatment involving an operation, chemotherapy and days spent in the hospital.
Fortunately, I had connections into the Heidelberg University Hospital, which is a leading centre for cancer research and cancer therapy in Germany. I knew of the advances that were being pioneered in Heidelberg regarding cancer therapies and managed to convince my father to consent to an experimental immunotherapy, which is outwardly and inwardly a lot less invasive and aggressive than traditional cancer treatments.
Guy became my father’s treating physician and with only three infusions of immunotherapeutics, my father’s life was extended in a qualitative and meaningful way by almost two years.
At that point, Guy introduced me to the research he had done at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester and transferred to Heidelberg regarding even more advanced treatment mechanisms for cancer using virus-based immunotherapeutics. These virus vectors are oncolytic and are genetically modified to selectively deliver immunotherapeutics to tumour cells.
The pre-clinical data he showed blew my mind and after my father passed away, we set up CanVirex to develop a next-generation platform technology for the treatment of cancer.
What do you mean by ‘oncolytic virus’?
Oncolytic viruses are a specific group of viruses that are known to kill cancer cells, whilst leaving normal, healthy cells intact. Historically, this phenomenon was discovered via cancer patients who contracted an infectious disease and then occasionally underwent brief periods of clinical remission.
Since these times, a lot of work has been done to manipulate these kinds of viruses to make them safer and to make them target cancerous cells more specifically. The amazing thing about oncolytic viruses is that they not only have the capacity to destroy tumour cells, they also have the capacity to repair our immune systems if we genetically modify them in the right way.
At the moment cancer is frequently being treated via surgical removal of tumours and radiation or chemotherapy. Whilst these methods may reduce the tumour burden and alleviate symptoms in the short run, the cancer will almost inevitably come back sooner or later because nothing has been done to induce an effective anti-tumour immune response.
What we need are cancer therapeutics that treat the disease at the root, and this, in a nutshell, is what we’re doing in CanVirex.
What is the status of the therapeutics you are developing at CanVirex?
So far, we have generated a sizeable portfolio of potential therapeutics. Our lead product is for gastrointestinal cancers and we should be taking this one into the clinic imminently. We have established a unique technological process necessary for GMP manufacturing and getting this part right was essential for both the clinical evaluation and commercial scale-up of our proprietary platform technology.
We are also using our virus platform to generate a polyvalent, second generation vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 and potentially other infectious diseases. Our platform technology is based on the common measles virus vaccine strain and as such, it is ideally suited to generating an efficacious and long-lasting cellular immune response.
The competition in the vaccine space is rampant at the moment, but we very much hope we can contribute a second-generation vaccine that has a superior profile to the first-generation vaccines currently approved. It is essential to create a long-term multifunctional cellular and humoral immune response that is robust against mutations. We have good reasons to believe that our measles virus-based vaccine candidate has the potential to do exactly this.
Can you tell us more about EsoCap?
EsoCap is a venture that took shape after a friendly discussion with a Professor friend of mine, Werner Weitschies. We were reflecting on the improbability of the fact that currently, it is impossible to deliver treatments locally for diseases of the oesophagus. These diseases are very difficult to treat, and if you do so, it usually creates side effects, which very often compromise a patient’s quality of life.
In a spontaneous thought experiment, Professor Weitschies and I came up with an idea that could significantly increase the contact time of active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) in the oesophagus. We explored the concept of a rolled-up wafer that could be loaded with different types of APIs and then unroll itself along the walls of the oesophagus.
By the end of the thought experiment, we had sketched out a product with an applicator system, containing a pill and a thin film wafer that could unroll itself across the full length of the oesophagus and thereby deliver APIs locally. We were surprised to find that no one had yet patented such an idea, so we wrote one immediately and created a company around it.
What stage are you at with the development of this product?
We demonstrated functionality with MRT imaging and are now in the process of starting a phase two trial in EOE, which is eosinophilic esophagitis, but the device would also be applicable to other diseases, indications or entities such as cancer, infections, reflux, Barrett’s syndrome, and so on.
The key issue is that local treatment, so far, is not possible because when you swallow a pill or a suspension, it immediately goes into the stomach. Therefore, the contact time of active drug is not sufficient to exert a pharmacodynamic effect. This is the problem we are resolving in EsoCap.
At the same time, we are now doing the industrial scale-up, so that we can actually produce this application device on a commercial scale.
What drives you?
I have a humanitarian approach to life. I believe that everyone should dedicate some effort to making a contribution that is socially meaningful. Aside from that, my children, my wife and the expectations I have of myself.
What is your view on failure?
Failure is a circumstantial consequence, whereby we don’t get to where we want to go. This has happened to me in previous ventures. I am familiar with this situation because I’ve started companies that didn’t live out their full potential for unpredictable reasons. It’s a part of life and we just have to deal with it as best as we can.
Failure can also mean giving up. You definitely can’t get to where you want to go if you give up, but if we abandon one thing for something that has greater potential and yields more fulfilment, we can turn something others might regard as failure into success.
If you know what’s meaningful in your life, you do everything in your power to make it work. That’s true for your private life as well as for your professional life. So, the most important thing is to figure that out. If one approach fails, you just try another way – you don’t give up until you get it.
Who or what has shaped who you are?
My parents. My adolescence. My genes. Also, the experiences I gathered along the way. I think we shape ourselves as we go along and learn one way or the other that what it comes down to is having the right mental attitude and emotional stability to cope with life’s challenges. Circumstances change all the time and who we are is a deeper question. It’s important not to take everything and everyone at face value.
For example, it’s not always easy to see the real qualities and the values of the people you surround yourself with unless you really take your time to understand them on a soul-level and adopt a disinterested point of view. I have often misjudged people in situations where I found myself under pressure or needed to be partial. A lot of people pretend to be something that they are not.
What I look for in people is honesty, transparency and clarity. These qualities combined with intelligence, skills, social capabilities and a couple of quirky idiosyncrasies make for someone I would want to both work with and be friends with.
Any lessons learnt over the years that you could share with us?
One of the lessons life teaches you, is to be wary of whom you trust and what you entrust them with. I have tended to distribute trust in places where I shouldn’t have because I know that in business, as in personal relationships, we can only progress if we trust others.
If you’re not smart with your allocation of trust, you can lose a lot and I certainly lost a fair bit. But I still consider myself lucky because I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t continually reinvested excessive amounts of trust in others.
Everything depends on people and how we complement each other as individuals. In my experience, building a successful company depends more on the personal and professional integrity of your team members than on the scientific expertise on which the company is founded.
You need to find compatible people who have the inner drive, who are loyal, hardworking and really want to make a difference. It’s certainly not in most people’s nature to work in an entrepreneurial, start-up-like environment because it demands a disproportionate amount of time and emotional investment as compared to working in a larger structure.
What is your hope for every single one of your companies?
The companies I have founded all have the potential to offer life-changing therapeutics to patients. I would like to see these products reach the market and make a meaningful difference.