InterAx recently announced an agreement with the Danish pharma company Lundbeck. What is this agreement about?
InterAx helps to reduce the number of compounds pharma companies have to screen, while assuring the quality of lead compound discovery. With our technology, the compounds predicted to be inactive can be skipped, and those predicted to be active can be prioritized. We will share our expertise with Lundbeck to help evaluate drug candidates.

What is the impact of the results you deliver to your clients, the pharma companies?
They come to us with several molecules that have the desired effect and want to know which ones they should investigate further. We can tell them which ones are a dead end. This is information you cannot get with traditional methods. And if you eliminate just one lead compound earlier, this can mean that you save millions of Francs.

How confident are you that InterAx will deliver useful results?
We already tested 20 compounds for asthma and showed that we can deliver, so I’m quite confident. And we will refine our methods and models further, of course.

And this is still manual work?
We’ll start to implement machine learning in systems biology over the next years. We’ve actually filed a project with Horizon 2020 that got a seal of excellence. Artificial intelligence is a hot topic for big pharma and IT companies, but to make meaningful statements about how molecules work you still need a systems biologist.

How do you find the right people in the large pharma companies that want to work together with InterAx?
The community of people that specialize in GPCR, a certain type of receptor, is quite close-knit. The Gordon conference about molecular pharmacology feels a little bit like a school reunion for me. In pharma firms, GPCR specialists are found in different divisions, for example, neuroscience. We try to have a scientific impact to make people aware of us. This is not that easy since our algorithms are a trade secret so we don’t want to publish it in its entirety.

Determining the structure of a receptor isn’t easy. Your model is specific to GPCRs and doesn’t work with other receptors, right?
Every receptor system has its own peculiarities, so yes. In theory, though, we could apply our systems biology algorithms to other receptor families, such as the receptors for insulin (which belong to the family of tyrosine-kinases). However, you shouldn’t underestimate GPCRs. These receptors play a role in a myriad of different diseases, cancer, Alzheimer, migraine, asthma, and Parkinson, just to name a few. In addition to that, we can model different cells in the body, nerve cells, pancreatic cells, etc. and predict how a substance will act upon this particular cell. All this can be done by tweaking the computer model.

You were a top academic in the field of GPCR and had what must have been a very nice job in a big pharma company in the field of drug discovery. Why did you decide to join an unknown startup based in Villigen, Switzerland, before it even did its first proper financing round?
When you have seen academia and big pharma, the startup world is the next logical step (laughs). Actually, I have known ETH Prof. Gebhard Schertler, one of InterAx co-founders, for 20 years. He’s Head of Biology and Chemistry at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen. Gebhard told me that he’s helping to start a company. At that time, at Novo Nordisk, I was interested in the topic InterAx’ CTO Aurélien Rizk was working on, systems biology. And when a restructuring wave hit Novo Nordisk, I was ready to take the jump.

You said you were interested in the topic of systems biology. Can you describe that?
Systems biology aims to develop mathematical models that describe the biology of a single cell. The receptors on a cell function like locks, and if you have an accurate model, you can make predictions about how well certain keys fit in and which doors are going to be opened. For example, we can predict the toxicity of a certain molecule, without having to resort to animal testing. This is an achievement on its own, but it also means saving a lot of time and money for pharma companies.

They say that research-stage biology is like pregnancy: You can’t speed things up, no matter how much money you throw at it.
To some extent, this is the reason why many pharma project managers are at their wits’ end. A while ago, people laughed at us, they said we’d never be able to realize our plans. Now that we have shown good results, everybody is interested. If you want to learn a skill that will be very valuable in the future, go for systems biology.

How easily can you find people with such skills?
It is a huge problem for us. Luckily I took a former colleague with me, Susanne Roth, she is a systems biologist. We had more than 60 applications for a job in the lab, but just a few for a systems biologist. Big pharma has the same problem, they can’t find qualified people. And to get work permits for specialists from the US or India isn’t easy in Switzerland.

Let’s talk a bit about your role of Chief Scientific Officer, what do you do?
Everything (laughs). In a small team, everybody needs to understand everything. But my priority is to develop our technology together with Aurélien and market it to the outside world. And in our field, marketing means speaking at scientific conferences and writing in peer-reviewed publications. That’s how we closed our first deals, such as the one with Lundbeck.