"In this company everything is possible!"

Your lab seem’s to be this year’s D-BSSE spinoff factory. Last Digital Campus we spoke with Steven Schmitt about ‘PepChat’ which is currently being founded. And you, just two weeks ago, co-founded ‘Omne Possibile’. Tell us: what is this company doing?

It is a company in which - obviously - everything is possible. We do research on alternative forms of nucleic acids such as DNA, RNA, typically summarised by the terms XNA or XZA that might be of use for pharmaceutical or, in general, biotechnological opportunities. 

The name of the startup is pretty magnificent: ’Omne Possibile’ refers to a quote by Gottfried Leibnitz (‘everything that is possible deserves to exist’). Where exactly do you see the great potential of this company?

The idea is that DNA and RNA are performing a specific task that they have in the cell based on specific chemical functions that are inherent in DNA and RNA. And these functions are well suited to living cells but make the manipulations of cells quite tedious. One idea is that if we replace - or substitute - specific elements in DNA (or RNA) we might be able to facilitate a number of different applications in a variety of fields. Much of this you can already see in use, if you look, for example at oligonucleotide-based drugs, and many of them do not contain real DNA or real RNA like the textbooks might define it but alternative nucleotides, simply to increase stability in bodily fluids or increase hybridization energy. The concept as such - alternative DNA- or RNA-molecules - might not be brand-new but we think that we have a great multidisciplinary team to push a lot the boundaries in this field.

Who are your customers?

The first line of customers will be somebody from the pharmaceutical industry who very often have deep pockets and who very often tolerate some of the bit more crazy ideas. And, at mid-term, the idea is that we would be able to come up with, for example, bacterial cells that no longer rely on DNA and RNA but on forms of memory storage and memory expression that would allow easier manipulations. Because, if you think about manipulating DNA today we have solutions for this but it is a reasonably tedious project, in particular if you try to do this at large scale.

Can you give some more examples of applications and sectors in which XNA can play (or plays) a growing role?

There are applications in all directions. Of course, the most immediate are in the pharmaceutical industry where they produce alternatives to DNA and RNA for all sorts of therapeutic applications. I would like to point out that the mRNA vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 that are currently distributed across the entire world are a form of alternative RNA. Also, the distribution on the field of long RNAs is considered as viable treatment against specific fungal pests in agriculture. All of this is within the domain of what we intend to do.

You are one of the founders. How did the idea for this start-up evolve, was this a longer process…? And: what is your future role in the company?

The idea for the company is not very old, the idea for the research behind has been entertained for a number of years, also in form of a number of joint research proposals from the group of PIs who actually came together to found the company. My role in this endeavour is scientific; in my lab we are exploring a number of research directions that I think are important for the future of metabolic engineering, or more specifically, for bacterial engineering. And some of this science will also go into the company. Next to this, my future role will be that of a strategic advisor. Omne Possibile has become an ETH start-up company here at D-BSSE, and we are currently residing in the building 1055 (BSD). I am helping the company to get started, but again, on the long-run my role will be that of a strategic advisor.

People in the audience might be interested in working for you. Are you recruiting, and if yes: what type of experts do you seek?

Yes, we are recruiting. One way to get in touch with us is to go to our company website and to check the open positions’ section for the profiles we are looking for. Essentially, for the group of people that is listening right now: we are looking for people who think it is fun to work on artificial intelligence applications for protein design or metabolic design; we are also looking for non-lab functions such as non-dilutive funding managers, these are people who have seen the lab and - after their PhD - know how to write and how to develop a project proposal. If you are interested, please let me know, you may simply drop me an email.
 

Thank you, Sven, these are all exciting news, all the best for your alternative nucleotides research and for the D-BSSE spinoff Omne Possibile!