"T-cell receptor therapies against cancer are a highly promising approach but challenges still exist"

Rodrigo, you are the Chief Scientific Officer of our most recently founded D-BSSE spinoff Engimmune Therapeutics. What is your spinoff doing?

We incorporated in August this year and our work is based on experimental and computational technologies developed in the Reddy Lab. Our goal is to apply these platform technologies for the development of engineered T cell therapies against cancer. More specifically, we focus on T-cell receptors, which enable precise targeting against antigens present on tumor cells. Another aspect of our activities is directed at generally improving the efficacy of T-cell therapy. T-cell receptor therapies against cancer are a highly promising approach but challenges still exist. While some challenges, especially those related to safety, have been largely addressed over the past 10 years, we believe that our function-based approach to T-cell receptor engineering will help accelerate the discovery of lead T-cell receptor compounds with favourable therapeutic properties. During my postdoctoral research with Professor Sai Reddy, we developed a platform technology based on genome editing, deep sequencing and high-throughput functional screening, thus enabling the engineering of synthetic T-cell receptors that are highly specific to a tumour target and also safe to use. For our first clinical programme we are targeting a tumour antigen that is present in high frequency in a wide variety of cancers, including melanoma, myeloma, lung cancer and ovarian cancer. This particular tumour antigen has been problematic in the past due to incidences of off-target activity. However, by applying our platform technology we have been able to successfully identify lead T-cell receptor candidates that are extremely specific to this target. In addition, we are using the same toolbox of genome editing, deep sequencing computational analysis and machine learning for development of additional mechanisms for improving the therapeutic efficacy of T-cell therapy.

What are the challenges you are facing during this start-up phase?

There are obviously a lot of different challenges when starting up a company. But the challenges that are specific to cell therapies are that one needs to really make sure to perform very careful safety screens as well as to improve T-cell efficacy and potency. This is because there have been a number of incidences in the past where the T cell receptor cell therapy itself was toxic to patients. In addition – albeit a very promising cancer therapeutic concept - the efficacy of T-cell therapy is still not high enough to justify the very high treatment cost involved. We believe that our platform technologies, which apply functional screening and advanced computational methods, can greatly accelerate the discovery of T-cell receptor lead molecules with an extremely low risk of off-target activity as well as improving the therapeutic efficacy eventually. Another challenge is the actual manufacturing of the T-cell product. This is not trivial and requires a process to be developed. We are currently working on a pilot process, and this process needs to be adapted and transferred to the standards of GMP (good manufacturing process) before it can enter clinical trials. These are just a few challenges from the R&D perspective and of course there are many others including securing financing, recruiting top talent and other company building aspects that are inherent to every biotech startup.

Who are your customers?

This is a complex question for a therapeutics company, given that approval and commercialization of a drug can take in excess of 10 years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. In a more immediate scenario, a ‘customer’ can be a large pharmaceutical company looking to collaborate with Engimmune for the development of joint programs, while other ‘customers’ could be companies acting as potential acquirers or even the public if the company is listed on a stock exchange. The end consumers of course would be patients in need of efficacious treatments against cancer. Importantly, engineered T cell therapies are highly expensive treatments that are currently only covered by insurers in certain countries. There is a big push in the field to bring down the costs of those T-cell therapies in order to be affordable for everyone and perhaps be incorporated in health care insurance systems. These include more cost-effective manufacturing, logistics and gene transfer methods (e.g., CRISPR-Cas9), which are areas that Engimmune is following closely.

Your first financing comes from BaseLaunch. Can you please explain this programme? And, which other ways are there to raise seed money?

We applied to the BaseLaunch programme in October last year and we went through the selection process which consisted of three presentations. Ultimately, the decision was made to fund us in June 2021, so the selection process took eight months. The process itself is extremely useful. Right from the ‘get-go’ there was interest in our project and the people working at BaseLaunch were extremely helpful in advising us on how best present and further develop our idea. BaseLaunch also opened their network to us so we could access advice from experts. In fact, we were put in touch with our now CEO Dr. Søren Mouritsen, who is a very experienced life science entrepreneur having co-founded multiple biotech startups in the past, including ones from academia. Dr. Mouritsen is also an MD (doctor of medicine) and Dr. MSc in immunology, which also plays a valuable role in developing our scientific and clinical strategy.

There are other programmes, such as VentureKick, and various support services provided by ETH Zurich…?

I did not participate in this programme - but I would highly recommend to everyone who wants to take the entrepreneurship avenue to do as many programmes as possible. I did a short course offered by VentureLabs (Business Creation in Biotech), which was a 5-day programme and was a great fit for me because I was juggling a number of things at that time. The VentureKick programme is highly competitive too and provides access to valuable networks…so, I could only recommend all these trainings and programmes! We also get amazing support from within ETH Zurich, in particular, from the Spinoff Office of ETH Zurich. This includes the possibility of hosting us at D-BSSE for 2 or even 3 years (including an extension). This is extremely helpful mostly in terms of time because setting up a lab from scratch is extremely time consuming and having the opportunity to be hosted here is, at least at the beginning, extremely helpful. We can only be grateful for this support!

At the moment you are a team of three: Søren Moritsen is your CEO, Sai Reddy serving as an advisor, and you the CSO. Once you start recruiting: what type of experts do you seek?

We do T-cell receptor engineering, but use a number of experimental and computational methods, so we will be hiring scientists with a background in protein engineering, immunology, and also computational biology. Those are the three main backgrounds we will be looking for now. Eventually we will also have to recruit seasoned preclinical and clinical experts. I should also mention that this of course develops from an academic project, and I should thank everyone who collaborated with us!


Rodrigo, please let us know about the next steps in the development of your company and in particular, once you start recruiting. For sure within D-BSSE there are many talents who like to become part of your endeavour. Thank you very much for your time. And all the best with your company!