Updates: Startup Inositec was acquired in November 2021 by Vifor Pharma. In 2022, Prof. Leroux was awarded the Maurice-Marie Janot Award for his pioneering work as researcher. 

For several years in a row, your work has been ranked among the 1% of top-cited publications. What is your secret?
Evaluating the work of professors by the papers they publish is one possible approach, but it shouldn’t be the only one. But I appreciate that what our group writes apparently also gets read. I don’t publish that much, others do much more. Luckily, ETH gives us the time and resources necessary to publish high-quality manuscripts.

Is creating startups also part of a professor’s job?
Not really. Our main job is to teach, make discoveries and disclose them. Starting companies is not in our genes. And for a long time, it wasn’t very well-perceived either. It’s time-consuming and it can be a distraction, some critics said. To a certain extent, this is true. A pure researcher doesn’t care about basic technical issues that are associated with the development of a product. For a venture, however, they’re crucial points. But I think that it is valuable for society if professors accompany some ideas farther down the road of commercialization. And I think that this opinion is shared here at ETH. For me, entrepreneurially driven Professors such as Dario Neri from ETH or Andreas Plückthun from the University of Zurich are an inspiration and important role models.

“It is valuable for society if professors accompany some ideas farther down the road to commercialization”

You manage a big lab that is brimming with more than a dozen Ph.D.s and postdocs. There must be a lot of ideas floating around. How do you filter them and decide which ones merit more attention?
By challenging ideas early on. Scientists are proud of their discoveries, and they should be. But they underestimate how long and difficult the way from discovery to clinical trials is, let alone to the market. There will be many occasions for failure, and this is why it is necessary to challenge a novel technology to find out if it is robust enough.

How?
You try to identify possible hurdles. How will the substance be manufactured? How will it be administered, will it be given orally or by injection? Are we talking of a dose in grams or milligrams? How frequently will it be dosed? If it needs to be administered 10 times a day, your solution isn’t viable. Compared to the gold standard, is it a lot better, or just a bit? There are dozens of questions like that, and all of them are reasons to get discouraged.

So is your role to discourage or to encourage brilliant scientists to become entrepreneurs?
I think that my role is to do both, in the right order. Talented young scientists come to me with ideas all the time. First, I challenge them and their ideas. From my work with large companies and startups, I have a feeling of why some ideas may not be clinically viable. It is better to kill those early on. Let me take an example. We’re working on a compound at the moment. I ordered a test to assess whether it causes genetic mutations, which could be a reason to drop it. It is a costly test, and it is still early in the discovery process, but this will help us decide if we want to push the idea forward and file a patent or if we will simply report our findings in a pharmaceutical journal. This is the first part of my job, challenging ideas. But when they are truly promising, I encourage people to continue working on them. Then I like to give them the support and guidance they need to become entrepreneurs.

You did that in the case of Versantis and Inositec. [Versantis develops a new generation of liver medicines that remove ammonia from the body.] I’m interested in how these two innovations started. Was the goal you wanted to achieve already clear in the beginning?
In the case of Versantis, we were working on things that were, let’s say, related. I attended a symposium about rare diseases, and that’s where I heard about hyperammonemia for the first time. I thought the approach we’re working on could really be well suited to solve this problem. We had to modify it, of course, and there were other challenges, but if you boil it down to the essence, the innovation was in connecting several things that had initially no obvious relationships.

With Inositec, you were inspired by a compound that is quite common in nature. [Inositec uses IP6, a substance found in many cells and in our diet.] Is that a common way of innovating?
Of course, many drugs come from nature, either from plants or bacteria. Nature provides us with many scaffolds to build upon. In the case of Inositec, the starting point was a natural compound known for its ability to bind to calcium phosphate and thereby inhibit calcification.

What is your role in the startups Versantis and Inositec?
I’m co-founder and shareholder of both startups and sit on the scientific advisory board. This board’s goal is to advise the startup on technological improvements and to identify the optimal indications. For Versantis, questions concerning clinical trials are very important at the moment

How close or distant is your relation to these startups?
I like to get involved in startups when I truly believe in them, but I don’t want to be part of the management team. Scientists like me should be relatively remote from startups. Aside from a few exceptions, we’re often not good managers. We are too emotionally related to our discoveries.

“We are too emotionally related to our discoveries”

Scientists are too emotional?
Of course. When I see how much money Versantis and Inositec raise, it somehow puts some pressure because I want them to succeed. Similar, when Versantis started its first trial in patients, it generated some excitement but also some stress, because I care about the outcome. It’s very exciting to be part of this, and I think this is more rewarding than publishing a paper can ever be.

What else will we see coming out of your lab in the future?
We have big interest in 3D printing as a way of delivering drugs. It’s amazing what you can do with a 3D printer and biodegradable materials. We have printed little tubes that are tracheal stents that could fit perfectly into a patient’s airway since they can be designed based on imaging data. They are also biodegradable and will slowly disappear after insertion.  You can even add some drugs to the printing process and fabricate personalized drug-eluting devices. As you can see here in our lab, the combination of different disciplines such as pharmacology, chemistry, materials sciences, and imaging allows exploring new exciting approaches.