Tag: Roche

akampion Meets… Dr. Markus Hosang, General Partner at BioMedPartners

Markus Hosang, General Partner at BioMedPartners, has a strong pharmaceutical and VC background. He was previously Venture Partner at MPM Capital. Prior to joining MPM in 2002, he was at Roche, where he served for nearly 20 years in several senior management positions in the Pharma R&D organization.

 

akampion: If you could give some advice to aspiring or very junior venture capital professionals, what would it be?

Markus Hosang: There are usually two approaches to becoming a venture capital professional. First, you can join as an Associate or Analyst pretty early on if you have a strong scientific background, combined with a business degree (MBA). The second route is gaining extensive management and executive expertise in big pharma or biotech companies and subsequently joining a VC firm as a Partner. In general, I believe that operational experience in pharma or biotech companies is very important if you want to succeed in the venture capital industry. Even Associates or Analysts should bring some years of industry experience, not just a strong scientific background.

When I was at Roche, I was fortunate to be part of an innovation-driven environment and management team of the company. Since then, I have always been attracted to pioneering industry trends – but I also had the chance to learn from failures.

 

akampion: So what are your investment criteria if you look at healthcare companies?

Markus Hosang: Data, science and patents have to be convincing. Equally important are growth perspectives and market environment. The third point, which is crucial and often overlooked, is the executive team – what are their strengths and weaknesses? Will they be able to deliver? In the past, I have often been disappointed by executives and founders with a pure academic background. On the other hand, if executives join a small company from big pharma, they need to prove that they can do without a huge corporate infrastructure. Will they be moving fast enough? But I also have to admit that I underestimated a few teams in the past.

 

akampion: What is the key difference between US and European companies?

Markus Hosang: In the US, there are clearly a lot more serial entrepreneurs who are very hands-on and pragmatic. There is a „done it before“ attitude. We don´t really have a serial entrepreneurial spirit in European healthcare yet.

 

akampion: What has changed in the healthcare industry over the past ten years?

Markus Hosang: The endpoints in biopharmaceutical drug development have definitely changed – not just at the FDA and EMA, but also in terms of reimbursement criteria. For investors, the emphasis has shifted even more to exit strategies and value inflection points. Exits happen earlier – often times, companies are factually being „leased“ by milestone-driven payments, which allow for staged acquisitions instead of buying a company as a whole.

 

akampion: What is your opinion on the current financing situation in Europe?

Markus Hosang: European private equity financings have been very generous in the past, but this has changed over the last couple of years. There is currently a shortage of funds in Europe, and as a result, there is a weeding out going on, which has even started to affect good companies. However, an excellent management team will source other funds and identify financing alternatives, such as grants. A good example here is Okairos in Italy.

 

akampion: At what stage do you invest in a company? And why did you choose to focus your investments on the Alpine region?

Markus Hosang: Before I consider an investment, the founders should have done their homework properly and also should have made some initial investments themselves. There must be a convincing business plan, maybe they have even won a business plan competition. The seed round must have completed successfully. Start-ups in Switzerland often hire mentors or advisors with a pharma background, which is a great advantage. The Alpine region is a very fertile ground. It has a very strong pharma industry and infrastructure, there are excellent universities and research institutions, and everything is located in the vicinity, easy to reach in a few hours. The latter point is particularly important for us as very active and involved investors, as it permits us to see our companies without too much (travel) efforts and on short notice, if required.

 

akampion: What motivates and inspires you in your daily work?

Markus Hosang: I very much enjoy applying my professional skills to a continuously broadening scope of activities. And I am thrilled to generate value and to keep track of a quickly developing sector, and perhaps, albeit indirectly, contribute to the solution of a still unmet medical need. Last not least, I love the collaboration and interaction between various teams and boards that I am on. Therefore, transparency and fairness are extremely important in my work.

Food for Thought: Weekly Wrap-Up

Solar cells can become cheap bulk ware, even for developing countries, writes Manfred Lindinger in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). He introduces a technology for printing a sheet of zinc oxide, a polymer containing fullerenes and an electrode made from polymers on paper. The technology developed at Technical University Chemnitz can use ordinary printing machines and paper, and the resulting solar paper can be bended and folded. However, the efficiency is still very poor (1.3% at 5 V compared to 10 or more with conventional ones). Life span will amount to a few months. For other approaches to make cheaper solar cells, see this post.

Martina Lenzen-Schulte, also in FAZ, explains how measle viruses leave cells to enter the airway. Today it is known that they do not proliferate in the outer epithelium cells but in lymph nodes. The way back is facilitated by the membrane protein nectin-4, which acts as a transporter carrying the virus through epithelial cells. Lenzen-Schulte also reports that the effect may explain why cancer cells, which often overexpress nectin-4, are vulnerable to measle and other viruses. This might pave a way to develop new oncolytic viruses.

Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, the nestor of the German biotechnology industry, makes the case for green biotechnology in the weekly Die Zeit. Winnacker criticizes the concept of coexistence that tries to avoid a blending of genetically modified and conventionally bred plants by defining a minimum distance between cultivated areas. In Germany, a farmer cultivating GMOs is liable for every case of cross-breeding, a provision that effectively prohibits GMO cultivation as there is a zero threshold for “contamination”. Winnacker also criticizes the strategy of patenting genetically modified plants instead of protecting them with the traditional plant variety rights that allow for exemptions for the further use of GMOs by breeders and farmers. Green biotechnology, he writes, has – at least in Europe – become the scapegoat for everything that is wrong with modern agriculture, from monoculture to declining biodiversity to the death of bees, although Europe is almost free from GM plants. As 25 years of research into the risk of green biotechnology have not been able to reveal any real danger, Winnacker proposes to amend the German law on genetic engineering and to simply omit the measures restricting the cultivation of GMOs.

Diabetics may soon be able to measure blood sugar without pricking, reports Der Spiegel. A new technology developed by researchers of John’s Hopkins University enables measuring of blood sugar in tear fluid.

In Wirtschaftswoche, Matthias Hohensee introduces US-based 23andme company which offers genetic testing at a rate of $99 plus a flat fee of $9 per month for access to the data. The company, which was criticized for exaggerating the benefits of personal genetic testing, also changed its business model and is now offering its records comprising the data of 125,000 people for research purposes, e.g. to find out why certain hereditary diseases display incomplete penetrance in different carriers of the respective genes.

Theres Lüthi in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) reports on clinical studies by Roche and Novartis in people suffering from Down’s or fragile X syndrome in an attempt to improve cognitive abilities.

Alyson Krueger in Forbes reports on a talk on synthetic biology given by Andrew Hessel of Singularity University during the Technonomy 2011 conference. Hessel describes synthetic biology as computer-assisted genetic design that goes from an idea to printing DNA to ultimately booting DNA and forecasts it will render the task of engineering life as straightforward as programming software, or creating a vaccine as simple as Tweeting.

Alex Knapp, also in Forbes, describes a “cyborg yeast” designed by researchers from the University of California at San Francisco and ETH Zurich, Switzerland. In the yeast, the expression of a certain gene can be switched on and off by different shades of red light. The technique may lead to advances in the production of proteins by yeast cultures.

The Economist reports on the first computational pathologist which can can distinguish between grades of breast-cancer cells to provide a more accurate prognosis than a human pathologist can manage.

And finally, scientists found a single gene which can make you appear kinder, reports Catherine de Lange in New Scientist. In experiments conducted at the University of Toronto, people with the so-called GG version of the oxytocin receptor gene were judged to be kinder than those with GA or AA versions. Those with GG variations used significantly more non-verbal empathetic gestures in their storytelling such as smiling and nodding which made them appear kinder.

 

Company News: Curetis AG Attracts Forbion and Roche As New Investors

– Series A financing round expanded to €34.1 million –

Curetis AG, an innovative molecular diagnostics company focusing on the development and commercialization of in-vitro diagnostic products for infectious diseases, today announced the expansion of its Series A financing round by € 9.6 million. The additional funds increase the round to a total of € 34.1 million and the total capital raised to date to € 36.6 million. The financing was led by Forbion Capital Partners together with Roche Venture Fund. CD-Venture and Curetis ́ management also participated in the round. Holger Reithinger, Partner at Forbion Capital Partners, has joined Curetis’ Board of Directors. Roche will get an observer seat on the Board of Directors.

Since its inception in 2007, Curetis AG has developed the versatile Unyvero™ instrument platform which handles disease-specific disposable cartridges for the analysis of various marker panels, covering both pathogens and antibiotic resistance genes. The Unyvero™ platform combines a unique, fully automated sample preparation working with a comprehensive range of native clinical sample types, with isolation, amplification and highly multiplexed detection of DNA. The simplified, automated and uniform work flow enables testing at the point of need, eliminates operator-induced variations and ensures high-quality results in a short time frame. The first application, a solution for comprehensive pneumonia testing, has successfully completed extensive pre-clinical testing, is about to enter into pivotal clinical trials towards regulatory clearance and is scheduled to enter the European market as a CE-marked device in 2012.

Food for Thought: Simply Obscene

In a recent article (“Simply Obscene”) the influential German news magazine “Der Spiegel” (20/2010, May 17, 2010) stated the pharma industry was using “with the unscrupulousness of a stock jobber” a loophole in Germany’s highly regulated health care system to charge extremely high prices for basically useless cancer medications. In particular, the article featured Yondelis by Pharma Mar, Nexavar by Bayer, Hycamtin and Tyverb by GlaxoSmithKline, Erbitux by Merck KGaA, Sutent by Pfizer, Iressa by AstraZeneca, Avastin, Xeloda, Mab-Thera and Herceptin by Roche and Alimta by Lilly as examples for cancer drugs providing only marginal survival benefits at enormous costs and stated this was “lawful looting of the health care system”.  The only exception according to the authors of the article was Novartis’ Gleevec.

This week, the Competence Network Malignant Lymphomas published an open “letter to the editor”  (only available in German) stating that in the case of lymphoma therapy the authors of the article had done “obviously sloppy work”: “Therapy costs of lymphocyte-specific antibody Rituximab [MabThera] amount to €24,000, not €134,000 per year. Several independent studies have demonstrated that overall survival in both follicular and diffuse large B cell lymphoma is prolonged on average by several years (!), in fact without substantial side effects.” Der Spiegel had stated extension of survival in these two indications was “not proven”.

The letter also said that administrative costs for studies to optimize therapies had increased by a a factor of 10 in the last couple of years due to legal requirements.

The article of Spiegel magazine is available online in German, however without the tables featuring treatment costs and extension of survival for the drugs mentioned.