Academia and industry joining forces

Biopôle’s fast-growing campus benefits from its location in the canton of Vaud, regarded as one of Europe’s most dynamic areas in the life sciences and home to a number of prestigious academic institutions, including the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne), the University of Lausanne (UNIL) and the CHUV. Today we are proud to witness how our community unites industry with academic and clinical research to advance crucial life sciences research and development.

Creating a collaboration framework

Over the years, Biopôle has become home to highly qualified students, leading academics and prestigious research institutes, including UNIL’s Department of Biochemistry, UNIL-CHUV’s Departments of Oncology and Immunology, Unisanté and the Ludwig Cancer Research institute.

Promoting public and private partnerships between Biopôle members and academia is one of our priorities and we regularly make our academic members aware of the potential for collaboration with our companies and partners. Similarly, we ensure that our companies can maximise the benefit of having access to academia’s in-depth knowledge of their subject areas. And collaboration takes on many forms, such as research with a university or clinical lab, a clinical trial or a licence in or out.

We’ve also built a strong academic network that plays a vital role in Biopôle’s innovation programmes. Representatives from the CHUV, EPFL and UNIL sit on the Biopôle Start-up Fund’s

Scientific Advisory Board or are involved as experts on the Vanguard Accelerator programme, ensuring technological advances are reviewed by relevant specialists. Through those networks, Biopôle member PeriVision launched a pilot study with the Jules-Gonin Eye Hospital in 2022 to challenge its next-generation eye-testing innovation, while

Consulto explored a clinical case study in Rheumatology with our Vanguard Expert and Head of Rheumatology at CHUV Professor Thomas Hügle.

Indeed, such is the CHUV’s reputation that collaboration with the organisation is an ambition for most start-ups. To help them realise that goal, we organised ‘CHUV meets Biopôle’ in 2022 –a two-part presentation giving entrepreneurs the chance to learn about partnership opportunities with the hospital. The sessions provided Biopôle’s entrepreneurs with an opportunity for an initial interaction with key contacts in health technology assessment – helping them understand how and why hospitals choose (or don’t choose) a technology. Other departments, such as clinical development, technology transfer and clinical data science were also available for interaction.

Finding talent at source

Undergraduate and postgraduate students are key targets for our companies within the Biopôle ecosystem. In that regard, we provided four of our start-ups with booths at the Life Sciences Career Day networking and careers guidance event organised by BioScience Network Lausanne in May, bringing our start-ups into contact with students and young researchers working in academia.

Biopôle also actively collaborates with different associations to promote entrepreneurship. Throughout 2022, several delegations of under- and postgraduate students came to visit the campus. In one such event, held in December, SV Industry brought EPFL students to meet two of our start-ups –Parithera and Distalmotion – as they opened their doors for a facility visit. The entrepreneurs also gave the students an insight into what it is like to work in their start-ups and what it takes to develop new innovations.

Tigen is a Swiss Biopôlebased biotech company working on T-cell-based therapies to treat cancer. Being a catalyst in the cell and gene ecosystem, it is scouting for novel science, co-develops therapies to commercial readiness and works with partners for global distribution.

In October 2022, Tigen exercised a licensing option with the CHUV on behalf of the Ludwig Cancer Research institute, based at the UNIL-CHUV Department of Oncology at Biopôle and one of four branches worldwide dedicated to preventing and controlling cancer. This first project focuses on developing a neoantigen-specific tumour infiltrating lymphocytes (NeoTIL) product. The relationship is built on an option, collaboration and licence agreement that covers the Neoantigenspecific T cell programme at the CHUV. It has strong foundations built on the partners’ complementary expertise and a mutual openness to learning and building on ideas, suggesting a long-term outlook for potentially better therapies.

‘The collaboration between the Ludwig institute, the CHUV, UNIL and

Tigen is unique. Experts in research, clinical and technical development are collaborating, early on and seamlessly, with the goal of accelerating access to novel therapies for patients.’ Jonathan Skipper, Executive Vice President for Technology Development, Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research

‘We are enthused to catalyse the further development with our technical, clinical and regulatory expertise and to eventually bring the novel therapies to patients around the globe.’ Emmanuel Savioz, Founder and CEO of Tigen

More than 50 events were organised by Biopôle SA in 2022 – opportunities for community members to network and connect.