The Future Is Now: Matthias Alder Of Gain Therapeutics On How Their Technological Innovations Will Shake Up The Tech Scene
…Most people have direct experience with the devastating effects of neurodegenerative diseases on members of their family or among their circle of friends. Being able to delay or stop these effects would change the lives for many patients, their families and caregivers. Imagine a world where people diagnosed with PD or Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia do not have to worry about their disease progression. Being able to give patients five to ten or more years of mental acuity and clarity, and the ability to engage with family members is priceless. We also know that chronic, age-related diseases impose a significant socioeconomic burden on society and the healthcare system. Our hope is to transform aging as we know it.
As a part of our series about cutting-edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Matthias Alder.
Matthias Alder serves as Chief Executive Officer and Director of Gain Therapeutics. He joined the Company in 2021 as Chief Operating Officer with more than 25 years of transactional, operational, and business development experience in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
It seems that often early in someone’s career, most of the opportunities we encounter are by coincidence. Growing up in Switzerland, I was interested in working in an international field like banking, insurance or pharmaceuticals. By chance, a close friend from law school pointed me to an open position at a pharma company, which then took me into the pharmaceutical and life sciences space. I knew immediately it was a field that I wanted to continue my career in because in this industry, we are all on a mission to help people who are suffering from debilitating diseases. Being involved in the development of a product that will have a lasting, beneficial effect on humanity has been a strong, intrinsic motivator that keeps me in the field.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
Years ago, I was at a biotech company developing a drug for the treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), a disease affecting mainly children. Some can be cured by current therapies, but many of these patients eventually stop responding to treatment and progress. We were working on the first cell therapy that made T cells recognize cancer cells and kill them off. That product eventually made it all the way through regulatory approval and is now available to patients.
One day, a young ALL patient who went into remission in one of the clinical trials for the T cell therapy sent us a thank-you note with a hand-drawn picture. It was of a house with a chimney, a stick figure family holding hands and an eagle soaring over the whole scene. This was such a heart-felt moment and really showed the impact we, as a biopharma industry, can have on patients and their families.
I’m lucky to continue that work today here at Gain. Almost everyone knows a family member or friend who has been afflicted by neurodegenerative diseases, like Parkinson’s disease (PD) or Alzheimer’s disease. Now that I’m at Gain Therapeutics, I have the opportunity to work with an incredible team to develop a drug that has the potential to slow or even stop the progression of these devastating diseases. That is all I need to get up and go to work every morning.
Can you tell us about the cutting-edge technological breakthroughs that you are working on? How do you think that will help people?
At Gain, we have developed a computational drug discovery platform integrating computational-based approaches, like AI-supported structural biology and supercomputer-powered physics-based models. With this platform, we can identify small molecules that act as allosteric regulators. More specifically, we are focused on developing the next generation of allosteric small molecule therapies. Briefly, allostery allows for the targeting of proteins at specific sites, away from an active, natural site. By targeting these allosteric sites, we can potentially conformationally change their structures and restore the normal function of a protein or disrupt the activity of a diseased protein.
We have applied this drug discovery platform to discover and develop a new drug candidate that has the potential to slow or stop the progression of PD and potentially other neurodegenerative diseases. The first indication we are targeting is PD. We are taking a small molecule that binds to an enzyme that is able to restore the function of the enzyme to make sure that cells become healthy. As a result, we are able to induce a disease-modifying effect with the aim of stopping disease progression. I believe we have a drug that has the potential to be best-in-class by actively restoring the function of our target protein, and to our knowledge, no other company is taking the same allosteric approach for the treatment of PD.
What I am most excited about is that based on the preclinical data we have generated with our drug candidate GT-02287, it has potential applications in other neurodegenerative diseases, including Gaucher disease, Lewy body dementia and Alzheimer’s.
How do you think this might change the world?
Most people have direct experience with the devastating effects of neurodegenerative diseases on members of their family or among their circle of friends. Being able to delay or stop these effects would change the lives for many patients, their families and caregivers.
Imagine a world where people diagnosed with PD or Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia do not have to worry about their disease progression. Being able to give patients five to ten or more years of mental acuity and clarity, and the ability to engage with family members is priceless. We also know that chronic, age-related diseases impose a significant socioeconomic burden on society and the healthcare system.
Our hope is to transform aging as we know it.
Keeping “Black Mirror” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks of this technology that people should think more deeply about?
With artificial intelligence, there is always a balance between drawbacks and advantages. For Gain, we are using AI tools and machine learning to speed up drug discovery. Instead of spending two or more years conducting long screening experiments trying to identify new molecules, we can leverage computational methods to complete the task in less than three months.
Of course, we need to confirm that these molecules are safe and effective, like in traditional drug development. However, by using advanced technologies we can compress drug development timelines and shorten it by two years. That’s already a very significant advantage, in terms of cost savings and increasing the likelihood of a drug to be successful in patients.
Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?
The idea for our computational discovery platform came to our Chief Technology Officer Xavi Barril more than 10 years ago. He set his mind to use computer models to find novel binding sites on proteins that previously have been considered undruggable. Xavi developed proprietary methods and algorithms that enabled the identification of these binding sites and subsequent sets of small molecules to fit those sites.
Xavi published his first paper to figure out how to identify pharmaceutically random binding sites on proteins that are not stackable. Using physics-based methods, he evaluated binding free energy measurements of molecular probes and how they engage with protein surfaces. Since then, the field has progressed and we now use an AI platform to generate 3D structures of proteins for our own platform. Also, since those early days, the number of supercomputer clusters has exploded all over the world, so that we can now have access to the computing power required to run our algorithms and models and conduct intensive calculations at a very low cost.
As our company evolves, we’re now taking the next step to move forward and utilize virtual screening, tapping into a new chemical space that has been developed over the last few years which now has 50 billion plus compounds that can be screened. If you screened one compound per second, this process would take 16 centuries. With our platform and available computing power, we can do the same in less than 24 hours. This approach along with our AI-driven platform will help us build the next generation of allosteric small molecule therapies.
What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?
While our technology is not a mass market tool, we are looking to expand the use of our platform through collaborations with other biopharma companies. We have developed a specialized technology that can identify novel allosteric binding sites, an emerging targeting approach that has gained traction within the pharmaceutical industry. We can use the platform to work on protein targets of interest to pharma partners that may not be trackable in their hands. Also, our platform allows us to build our own pipeline of drug candidates that may attract partnerships with other pharma companies.
What have you been doing to publicize this idea? Have you been using any innovative marketing strategies?
The public recognition of drug discovery platforms comes with the successful development of drugs discovered with the technology. We are about to start the first clinical trial with our lead program in Parkinson’s that was discovered with the platform. This milestone represents a major inflection point and provides validation of our platform.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I would say I’m most thankful for my first boss, who was the head of the pharma legal department at the company where I started my career. He was just fundamentally smart, extremely experienced and yet very humble. His demeanor, honesty and transparency were the guiding light for me on how I want to be and how I want to engage with my colleagues and with people that I work with across the industry.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
Being engaged in the process of discovering and developing groundbreaking therapies is exciting and highly motivating. There’s still a lot to do and bumps along the road that we need to overcome. However, when I look back at the end of my career, having been part of the team that helped bring a therapy to market that enables people with neurodegenerative diseases to live longer, happier lives, that would be an awesome legacy.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
It’s hard to pinpoint five things. I believe that you have to make experiences for yourself and grow from each of those experiences.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
Respect, tolerance and understanding. A movement that would instill and reinforce these properties in people would make the whole world better off.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. If you’re staying in your comfort zone, you’re never going to expand, have new experiences or grow as a person.
As an avid cyclist, I’m constantly pushing myself out of my comfort zone. I started out with 20 mile rides, then up to 40 miles. Then after several years of pushing myself, I can ride up to 200 miles in one day. Now I can do those 20 mile rides in my sleep.
I’ve applied this same concept throughout my career in the biopharma industry. Every time I changed roles and jobs, I was going from a place where I knew exactly what I was doing to a new place and seeing how I can learn something novel and add to my experience professionally and personally.
This mindset ultimately led me from being a new young attorney in a legal department of a very large company with very little influence to the CEO of Gain Therapeutics, where I’m helping drive forward the development of a disease-modifying therapy in PD. I would recommend that approach to anybody for their professional career.
Some very well-known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)
Gain Therapeutics is a computational drug discovery company that has applied its platform to generate a potentially disease-modifying therapy in Parkinson’s that is now entering the clinic development phase. Transitioning from a preclinical to clinical stage company is a major inflection point and a significant opportunity for all stakeholders, investors and patients.
Deploying our highly advanced platform that utilizes AI and physics-based models, we accelerate drug discovery and bring forward treatments for untreatable or difficult-to-treat disorders including neurodegenerative diseases, rare genetic disorders and oncology.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/malder/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/gain-therapeutics/
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
