“It is not so straight forward to turn an academic idea into a commercially attractive offer”

Steven, you are currently in the process of founding the D-BSSE spinoff “PepChat” together with four co-founders. Tell us what your company is doing?

Put into a nutshell the idea of PepChat is to provide the pharmaceutical and biotech-industry with novel chemical matter. In other words: we have developed a platform which allows us to design and produce potential drug candidates no-one else could make so far. We focus on a very specific class of molecules, and these are: ribosomal and, especially, non-ribosomal peptides which are so far highly underrepresented in the classical drug-development pipelines. They are a bit larger than what is normally used and at the same time they are way smaller than what you normally see in use for therapeutic proteins such as for antibodies and the alike. So, with this chemical class we fill a niche where only very few other companies fit in. In addition to that, we not only have the technology to design and produce millions of those molecules, but at the same time we are also able to test those molecules for their biological function(s). So, we can identify potential drug candidates amongst millions of molecules within a few days. This is what PepChat is actually offering to industry partners.

The basis for this company was laid in 2018 when you and Irene Wüthrich, both from the Panke lab, received the ETH Pioneer Fellowship for the project “SpheroBiotics” to explore commercialization of a technology platform for the discovery of antibiotics from nature. What were your greatest learning(s) during this exploration and subsequent startup phases?

For me there are two key learnings which came out of this period from 2018 onwards: Firstly, it is not so easy and straight forward to transform a purely academic - and this was what our Pioneer Fellowship project clearly was: an academic idea - into a commercially attractive offer which is being accepted outside of the academic world. Although I don’t like this term of ‘academic ivory tower’ this is exactly what we had to leave to find out how people in industry think, in particular, researchers in the pharmaceutical industry, but also in the venture capital world, to understand their language and to understand their needs. And this was definitely one of the key learnings for me. It is essential to understand as quickly and as early as possible what they want, they are potential customers and potential investors; this was truly the main effort for us. Secondly, this is of course very much connected to the first learning, is that it all takes time, a lot of time…! To give you an example: we talked to one large industry partner, and we had about a dozen of conversations with this partner over a year or so until we had found the same language, understood their needs and had a proposal and finally, a contract ready on which we all could agree upon. So, this second learning is: it all takes time to get there…

At the end of your Pioneer Fellowship, the proof-of-concept was solid and you decided to keep on going. In 2019 you considered the incorporation of your company but it took another two years until a new company with a new name was founded. Why is that…?

For me, it was never important to found a company for the sake of founding a company. If you want to start a company you simply do it, it takes a little bit of money, and there the company is… For me it was more important to have the strategy, the partners, and the funds in order to have the company thrive and grow over longer time. And, when we finished our Pioneer Fellowship, we clearly were not at the point to found the company yet. We had the scientific proof-of-concept, that looked all good, and from that perspective we were completely happy. But we had to learn: in order to make it attractive to people outside the academic world we had to add important aspects to our platform which were still missing. So, not only the scientific aspects were important to sort out but also additional aspects. And this is why we basically re-modelled everything completely. We took the project which was called ‘SpheroBiotics’ and took additional people onboard, including Martin Held from the D-BSSE, and we massively expanded our technology and joined forces with the director of the MPI-Department of Natural Product Function and Engineering in Marburg, Germany, Helge Bode. We fused his technology with our technology and formed a new company out of that which is the reason why the name changed to PepChat. This is where we are at the moment: it is no longer Irene and myself but there are three more people in the co-founding team, and the concept differs completely from the Pioneer Fellowship concept. This is all great fun, it was truly a lot of fun to talk to the people and negotiate all the details, but - again - it all takes a great deal of time… Now we reached the point in time where we need to found the company, we actually need to sign the contracts, we need to have the legal entity in order to sign these contracts.

If you were to rewind time, what is it you would have liked to know 3 years ago; in other words: what tips & tricks and advice can you give other young entrepreneurs that could help their company plans?

Yes, this is of course a very personal view and strongly depends on the industry you are in: it would have been a big advantage to go out and leave the ‘academic ivory tower’ much earlier. So, my advice to young entrepreneurs would be to go to your potential customers, talk to potential investors…and ideally this should happen before you apply for the Pioneer Fellowship, do this the moment you start thinking about founding a company. Talk to the people, get their ideas, try to understand their language, understand their problems and then based on this knowledge you formulate your Pioneer Fellowship project. This makes your project idea less academic, you win additional time to talk to people during the Fellowship, and eventually, to deliver a proof-of-concept that fits exactly to what the market requirements are. So, the moment you finish your Pioneer Fellowship you are ready to sign a contract with a pharmaceutical partner or sign a term sheet with a venture capitalist because the project exactly fits their needs and you are most likely ‘off the ground’ faster than we were.


Big thanks for your time, Steven, I know you are very busy these days; and all the best for you and your company!