“In this global pandemic D-BSSE is capable of tackling every aspect”

Derek, you recently finished your PhD in the Reddy Group. In addition, two years ago you co-founded the ETH spinoff deepCDR Biologics together with Simon Friedensohn and Sai Reddy. In fact, you founded deepCDR Biologics in your 3rd year of research, other founders first complete their PhD before considering the foundation of a company. What was the driver for this timing?

Yes, great question. First I wanted to say that it is my pleasure to be part of the Digital Campus this week, to talk about some of my experiences as a former PhD student at D-BSSE and now as a co-founder of a D-BSSE spinoff. A point of clarification: we actually founded the company last year, so it has been operational for only a year and a half, not quite two years. We did decide to found the company during my final year, i.e. my third year of PhD for a number of reasons. One of the major drivers for this is that we are very active in presenting some of our work at very industry-focused conferences around the world. At these conferences there are a lot of big players in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry, and after getting some feedback from some of these conferences we came to the realisation that there is a lot of interest from a lot of companies out there to harness our approach of combining machine-learning with the entire antibody discovery and optimisation process. A little background on the company: deepCDR is an antibody discovery and development service provider. By combining the discovery process with machine-learning we can drastically reduce the time and costs associated with conventional antibody discovery and development to bring the best possible candidates into pre-clinical studies.

As an ETH startup you also receive support from ETH Transfer, the ETH technology transfer office. In addition, there are several federal and cantonal (or regional) institutions that offer trainings and resources to startups. How does this support look like and in what way is it useful to founders?

Exactly. The ETH technology transfer office has been very helpful. Obviously, all of the technology that we utilise in the company was actually developed in Professor Reddy’s research group. And, the ETH tech transfer office was very instrumental in helping us compile all this information and submit patent application to the World Patent Organisation to get protection across the globe for our technology that we utilise in the company. And then they were also very helpful and instrumental in granting our company an exclusive license agreement for this technology which allows us to operate and commercialise what we developed in the research group. But on top of this there are other federal programmes that I probably should highlight: we are part of the Venture Kick programme and are applying this year for the Basel-founded BaseLaunch programme through BaselSwissArea. These are two great programmes that I really, really recommend to anybody out there who has an entrepreneurial spirit and is interested in the startup community, especially in the biotech space. They offer a lot of free trainings and seminars, a lot of them have moved virtual - for now but hopefully in the near future they will go back to in-person training and seminars - talking about what it is like to be a startup, how to present yourself to potential investors and things like this. And at the very least out of all of it you can usually get a very nice ‘apéro’ in the end from these programmes…

Your startup “deepCDR Biologics” gains momentum during COVID-19 times. Can you describe what your company is doing and how it will contribute to the discovery of an antiviral antibody therapy against Sars-CoV-2?

Yes, absolutely. We are obviously in the midst of a global pandemic and this is a very unfortunate environment for a lot of startup companies. We ourselves have had a lot of projects with potential customers be put on hold until the pandemic has subsided and some more funding has been released. But what this has allowed us to do is to look internally and develop collaborations with ETH Zurich and the cantonal hospital Basel-Land to help identify antibodies from COVID-19 patients. With the cantonal hospital Basel-Land we are actually able to sample immune cells from over 300 COVID-19 patients. And we hope by mining the sequencing data of these immune cells from COVID-19 patients that we can identify potential therapeutic antibodies that can infer the protective nature against the virus. So, this is a perfect platform to showcase the deepCDR technology and antibody discovery and development and opened up collaborations with people that we were not previously known to such as the Kantonsspital Basel-Land.

Economies are struggling worldwide during these extraordinary times, and in particular the startup community is hit severely by the coronavirus. Do you see anything positive that comes out of the pandemic…?

Yes, the silver lining out of all of this is that for the first time in history the entire scientific community is brought together to try and tackle the same problem. There are going to be a lot of great findings that will come out of this research over the next couple of decades even that will hopefully make us better prepared as a global society for if and when this happens in the future. I don’t know about all of you but the fact that the department’s After Work Pint on Thursdays has been cancelled has been completely devastating to me, so I am looking forward to getting back to some normalcy there. What I also like to highlight is that it helps to showcase the importance and the critical research that we are doing here at the D-BSSE. There are groups that are tackling every aspect of the global pandemic, from understanding the biology behind the virus to developing different diagnostic techniques to actually modelling and tracking the evolution and phylogeny of the virus and to actually develop therapeutic strategies against it. It really showcases the importance and capability of the D-BSSE to tackle every aspect of this global pandemic.


Many thanks, Derek, we keep our fingers crossed for your research and the further development of deepCDR!