the birth of a SPINOFF: EarlySight
part 2: spotlight on a spinoff from EPFL
NOVEMBER 2020
by Giammarco Pacifico, Marta Gaia Zanchi
This is Part 2 of a short series of posts in which we explain how turning the next game-changing technology from a lab into a high-impact product available to men and women everywhere has always been the result of a mix of domain knowledge, intellectual curiosity, gut feeling, and being in the right place at the right time, equipped with the right mentors and role models.
Our quest to explain how a health technology spinoff is born starts in Switzerland, with today’s blog on EPFL-spinoff EarlySight and our next one on CERN-spinoff Terapet.
More than 4 years ago EarlySight started as a project at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), a research institute and university in Lausanne, Switzerland, that specializes in natural sciences and engineering. Specifically, it started in a lab with the aim of investigating transscleral illumination for retinal imaging, in an effort to overcome current imaging technologies’ intrinsic limitations due to the low-absorption coefficients and scattering properties of the retina. Timothé Laforest and Mathieu Kunzi realized that these limitations were the key bottleneck to imaging solutions that could unlock key insights on disease onset and accurate early diagnosis for a global and large population of underserved patients.
“Being at the interface between the patient and the doctor is where technical discoveries can make a huge difference,” says Timothé, now the CEO of EarlySight. “I have a background in Electrical Engineering and while studying my EE Master of Science, I was soon passionate about imaging technologies and decided to register as well for a Master of Science in imaging for life sciences and automation engineering. […] Understanding the patient journey and the doctor’s needs within a transdisciplinary project is what I enjoy the most.”
To build a more reliable imaging solution, Timothé and Mathieu developed a system that uses multiple light sources and an innovative lateral illumination to focus on the physiological details of the retina, which unlocks unprecedented opportunities for the development of early diagnostics and new treatments. They have also patented a dark field acquisition system coupled to feedback loop signals to correct for eye movements and occular aberrations.
Developing the functional prototype was not easy and it required years of hard work: “The hardest technological challenge was being able to get a sufficient imaging resolution in order to distinguish single cells inside the eye. Because a living eye is not a perfect optical system, there are what is called optical aberrations that are blurring the image when we look inside it,” commented Mathieu, now the CTO of EarlySight. “We had to use advanced components, called adaptive optics, in order to get rid of these aberrations”.
However, Timothé adds, technical skills will only get you so far. “During my Ph.D. and my postdoc, I learned a lot about project management. Being project leader but also observing my supervisors and other supervisors’ methods brought me experience which is as valuable as the scientific skills I acquired.”
“The most important thing is to find someone you are comfortable working with because you are going to spend quite some time working together. Having spent some years in academia within the same lab definitely helps to evaluate this. You also have to find someone that has more or less the same vision on where the project should go in the long run and agree about the main milestones to get there,” the two now long-time partners comment in unison.
Even with the best of cofounders, a sure ingredient to starting a great spinoff is having the right advisors in place. Here’s where being in academia can be helpful: “Being in academia helped us as we had access through conferences to many experts in the adaptive optics field, something that is rarer in the industry as it is a recent field” continued Mathieu.
One such expert is Christophe Moser, Associate Professor of Microengineering and Industrial Relations at EPFL, as well as the head of the EPFL laboratory where the technology came from. Christophe speaks with pride after we asked him to comment on his former students and current cofounders, Timothé and Mathieu. “Timothé came as a Postdoc in my group and I knew Mathieu as a Master student at EPFL.”
“The retina imaging project started as a curiosity with multiple false starts and this is when they started to collaborate extensively.“ Christophe had already had two successful exits prior to meeting Timothé and Mathieu, and he has learned to recognize entrepreneurial talent when he sees it. “They learned to be entrepreneurs by doing, by talking to the end users, taking their inputs to refine the prototype, not being afraid to show early prototypes and finding out who would be interested to buy such an instrument and for what purpose. When I saw them implementing this process pro-actively, I believed they could become successful startup founders.”
Christophe also puts the spotlight on the importance of having founders with complementary expertise, nurturing trust in a team, and cultivating each other strengths and responsibilities. “Timothé has more experience on the electronics side and Mathieu on the optical design side. I saw them grow as entrepreneurs when they started to collect the first images of the deeper cells of the retina first ex-vivo and then in-vivo. They then started to realize the potential. They accomplished phenomenal technical work that teams many times larger in personnel and manpower had not. I believe it is the trust in each other’s ability to deliver. Initially, it was mainly on a technical level and then as they matured as Entrepreneurs, they each found a role they could grow in.”
When asked about what academia should do differently to foster more translational research, Christophe adds: “Professors are focused on getting tenured and peer recognition via high impact publications in Nature, Science, Cell, which is the currency that the academic promotion system has established for achieving excellence. Translating research needs to follow up on this work which is less novel but necessary to get technology out of the laboratory. I see that this follow up work is less recognized by academia. If more recognition for translation work would be encouraged, I believe we would see a greater conversion of technology into the real world.” If only that could be accomplished, “Instruments already exist in various forms to help translate technology developed in academic laboratories.”
To sum up, here’s the lesson EarlySight gave to scientists turning their inventions into spinoffs:
- Stay close to where healthcare happens: at the interface between patient and doctor
- Develop your soft skills, especially project management
- Take advantage of the network academia has to offer-to surround yourself with the best partners, cofounders, advisors
- Learn by doing, by talking to the end users, by not being afraid to hear “no”
- Develop trust in your team, by figuring out problems together
- Advocate for your professors to be recognized and valued for their translational work
To learn more about EarlySight’s inspiring story and potential, read here.
