How can you combine the advantages of a venture capitalist (VC) and a venture builder? And what benefits can this model offer to an early-stage biotech start-up? We asked Jean-Marc Le Doussal, Founder and CEO of biotherapy portfolio company Remora Biotech, and Ermir Kalaj, CEO of Cellula Therapeutics, a start-up developing next-generation CAR-T cell therapies. Both companies are redefining what it means to connect investors, entrepreneurs and researchers.
An innovative approach to biotech investment
Remora Biotech doesn’t act as a VC or a venture builder. Instead, it assumes the positions of both investor and entrepreneur, with a keen eye on the challenges involved in early-stage start-ups. Jean-Marc clarifies their approach: ‘VCs are good at investing in assets with clear financial, regulatory and clinical plans. But for early-stage assets, their approach doesn’t fit. You can’t plan while you are designing and selecting lead molecules. Instead, you have to optimise your research and design processes before you move to clinical trials.’ Besides, VCs need to maintain their independence and therefore can’t participate fully in their invested companies as entrepreneurs for compliance reasons. By contrast, Remora Biotech’s team can be ‘the entrepreneur’, working alongside researchers and clinical experts throughout product design, to learn the latest developments in science and clinical research, adapting quickly.
An American idea in a European context
While the model is not new, it’s distinct in Switzerland: ‘It was first developed in the US,’ Jean-Marc outlines, ‘but it has been implemented in various ways: from a loosely organised ecosystem to integrated entrepreneur-led organisations. We’ve adapted it to a European scale, and we’re completely integrated in terms of finance, team and research facilities.’
While a traditional US-based VC firm might seek to deploy US$50m in seed capital, Remora uses a more modest and efficient strategy, leveraging its own internal balance sheet equity, shareholders/co-investors and non-dilutive government grants. Jean-Marc explains: ‘We have a very structured investment plan to set the goals and estimate the spending required for each phase of development, right up to the scale-up plan where we expect to gain traction.’ The aim is to de-risk the technology and the biotherapy assets before involving larger partners, such as pharma companies or VCs. It also means that, during their seed phase, biotech start-ups don’t have to search for external financing every 12 to 18 months; instead, they can focus on their technology.
Remora’s relationship with Cellula
Rather than coming to Remora seeking funding, Cellula Therapeutics was born by combining OGD2 Pharma (another Remora venture) with Professor Denis Migliorini’s teams and assets in the field of glioblastoma (GBM) research to develop new CAR-T approaches. Ermir, a specialist in cell and gene therapy who collaborated previously with OGD2 Pharma, saw an opportunity to take the lead for this new venture. After engaging in a one-year incubation period, they formally incorporated Cellula Therapeutics in July 2023, with a clear focus on CAR-T cell technology for GBM – an area characterised by historically poor outcomes.
Cellula was therefore Remora’s venture from the outset, with the two companies working closely to design the product. ‘From the beginning we integrated our capabilities, from early-stage research to proof of concept,’ Ermir explains, ‘working primarily to decrease the risk of failure so that we could have a chance to progress.’ A secondary aim was to reduce the projected project costs, including the manufacturing outlay, which can be a barrier when developing and commercialising cell therapy.
The impact of academic expertise and infrastructure
Partnering with academia – especially with the University of Geneva and Lausanne’s university hospital (CHUV) – has been key to Cellula’s development. These collaborations offer Cellula a strategic advantage as they benefit from direct access to existing manufacturing and clinical infrastructure for cell therapies. ‘Our mutual proximity facilitates a fully integrated value chain,’ Ermir explains. ‘It encompasses cell process development, manufacturing and clinical study execution – which is rarely found under one governance structure in the industry’. Jean-Marc explains how special this configuration is: ‘You can’t always establish this kind of relationship with academic partners. We meet with Denis and his lab every week and we discuss every issue. This level of integration makes a real difference to the quality of the product design and our ability to overcome obstacles’.
Less freedom for less risk?
According to their arrangement, Cellula maintains operational independence, but their strategy must align with the broader Remora model, for instance keeping Cellula’s sole focus on brain cancers. When asked whether this limited autonomy was a downside to the relationship, Ermir explains it was an agreed-upon condition from the project’s inception: ‘We need to stay integrated with the overall Remora strategy; we consider it a factor in our success.’ After all, there are many advantages: ‘This integrated model helps us to achieve our targets – both to bring something new to patients and for our investors – by giving us an efficient capital structure with a reduced risk of failure.’
So, what’s the end game?
For Cellula, this innovative structure provides stability and enables the team to focus on development rather than perpetual fundraising, with the ultimate goal of selling well-designed new biotherapy candidates to industry partners able to rapidly develop and commercialise. And, more widely, the ‘collective effort’ – as Ermir describes it – involved in Remora’s highly integrated model, should provide a significantly better success rate for early-stage biotech start-ups.
