the birth of a SPINOFF: Elypta

marta g. zanchi
nina capital
Published in
7 min readNov 23, 2020

part 4: spotlight on a spinoff from Chalmers

NOVEMBER 2020

by Giammarco Pacifico, Marta Gaia Zanchi

This is Part 4 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.

After two stops in Switzerland, featuring EarlySight and Terapet, our journey to highlight impactful spinoffs continues in Gothenburg, Sweden, on the banks of the Göta älv.

Finding solutions to diagnose, monitor, and treat cancer has driven global efforts for decades and although many advancements have been made, it is only relatively recently that the true scale of the challenge has come to the surface due to incredibly complex mechanisms behind the disease and patients’ truly individual responses.

Elypta is aiming to tackle that complexity through detection of personalized signatures of cancer and close tracking of disease by measuring a system of metabolic biomarkers in both blood and urine, a result made possible by numerous years of research at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.

“We have to do it for society,” Professor Jens Nielsen told us during our interview on the motivations behind the birth of the startup. Nielsen leads the laboratory of Synthetic Biology at Chalmers, a pioneering group in this field where Francesco Gatto demonstrated and published initial results on the Glycosaminoglycans (GAG) profile of different cancers in 2015.

Jens B NIELSEN

“The idea that we could use engineering approaches to advance cancer development by finding new biomarkers originally brought me to study the field,” says Jens. “After some initial experiments, we were surprised they were so strong and once we saw a lot of enthusiasm, we decided to pursue it.” Jens and Francesco are now co-founders of Elypta, where Francesco is also the full-time Chief Scientific Officer (CSO).

Francesco speaks with gratitude of the role of Jens in his trajectory as an entrepreneur, and his memory of that time when life took an unexpected trajectory is obviously very vivid in his mind. “I owe it to my Ph.D. supervisor and future co-founder. It was in March 2015, around six months before my PhD defense. I had in mind a quite different career path after my graduation. I have always viewed the research that we were conducting on metabolic liquid biomarkers for cancer, the glycosaminoglycans, as an interesting side project.”

Over time, the data became more and more compelling and the clinical nature of those early proof of concept studies made it simpler for me to comprehend how it really works in a hospital treating real cancer patients. Jens saw something in all of this. He pushed me to do this and we just did it, recalls Francesco. Since the very beginning, they focused on a lead indication on renal cell carcinoma from surveillance of recurrence to monitoring treatment response, but from idea to launch, the transition was far from linear. “It was a very slow transition. Before we incorporate Elypta, this had incubated as a venture project for roughly two years. I had been skeptical. The more I learnt about business, the more I was convinced that the business case was unfortunately weak because my initial calculations suggested that the renal cell cancer was a relatively small market despite the tremendous need for new biomarkers.” Francesco, however, realized that the business case of the project was much more compelling than initially understood─in two important ways. “It turns out that there was an application in renal cell cancer that we initially overlooked with a significant market, an application that only serial interviews with urologists and payers’ willingness-to-pay studies helped to delineate. So, the test we are developing now is very valuable on its own. [And then,] when we first received data on our biomarker in another cancer type, I finally convinced myself that this is it.” A large business opportunity was clearly in sight for Elypta’s future. “We filed a new patent application, I started looking for a CEO I could trust with this business, and once Karl was on board, we incorporated Elypta.”

Karl BERGMAN & Francesco GATTO

Karl Bergman, CEO of Elypta, was the last and crucial piece of the puzzle. Karl combines a background in bioengineering to experience as an executive and operator in startups and large corporations alike. He has a clear perspective on the role of academia to foster innovation, and what Sweden is doing right. “I am a fan of the Swedish model where the researcher owns their intellectual property in full as it maximizes incentives and control for the key persons, similar to software tech founders. This both drives interest in entrepreneurially minded researchers to learn more about translational science and enables a situation where the founder can use shares in the new venture to assemble the best possible team”. That said, “there are too many translational projects that terminate for reasons other than actual results at an early stage.”

Himself a graduate of Chalmers, a competitive high-class institution with large contributions in society and top 12 in the world on research impact and cooperativeness, Karl speaks with confidence of the key ingredients for successful technology translation. “[There is] the significant challenge of understanding all critical domains of expertise needed and attracting them. I think facilitating this team formation, pulling in experienced alumni excited by the idea of launching a start-up, may be one of the more important tasks universities could do better on,” says Karl. “These networks are naturally accessible in tech in general and boosted further in places like Silicon Valley but for a life sciences start-up, the diversity of expertise needed is greater and the founder coming from academia is often highly specialized and naturally lacks broader networks. Get incentives and team formation right and I think good translational science will flourish.”

The importance of networks and the opportunity to tap into them effectively comes up often in our interviews. It’s a quality that distinguishes all the scientists turned founders we have talked with. Speaking of Francesco, Jens says: “He is an extremely bright man. I was surprised by his ability to acquire knowledge and learn new methods. Not only that, he is super able to get relationships and reach out for connections,” sharing an example when, early in their venture, Francesco’s managed to get plasma samples shipped from Italy, process them in Gothenburg, and get them tested in another top-tier laboratory back in Italy, all in record time and by working his first and second-degree networks.

Expanding on this topic, Jens adds that the key to successful translational research is collaboration. “Especially with clinicians, it is important to find the real need and most of the time, you cannot read about it online and you can only understand the complexity of the situation by talking and discussing with people.” The fear of sharing ideas with others is, conversely, a worrisome trait. He points out that open-mindedness is key to success, and “in most cases, you gain much more by opening up and discussing with peers.”

“Francesco just finds solutions to problems.” It would be interesting to evaluate if such problem-solving skills come from an engineering background or if people with these traits are attracted to study engineering. Regardless, they surely are an essential part of building new companies — one problem at a time.

Elypta’s scalable laboratory assay was finalized in 2019 while developing advanced algorithms trained by their clinical database to effectively detect biomarkers. The company now proudly sponsors the clinical trial series AURORAX to investigate applications in our lead indication renal cell carcinoma from surveillance of recurrence to monitoring treatment response, while continuing to explore other indications to understand the full potential for Elypta’s platform for closely monitoring cancer. The huge potential of Elypta is just beginning to express itself. It is inspiring to think that it all started with one researcher taking an unexpected leap of faith in his career, with the strong endorsement and encouragement of his laboratory head and professor.

To conclude, here are a few take-home insights from our conversations with Elypta’s founders:

  • The diversity of expertise required for successful translational research in healthcare is greater than in most other fields. Collaboration between multiple disciplines is key.
  • No matter the background, a “problem solving” attitude that extends beyond the bench, and strong networking skills as part of the solution toolkit, are clear markers of entrepreneurial talent. Professors who recognize and nurture this trait in their students and researchers can only improve the probability of success in translating scientific discoveries into ventures.
  • Universities that give their professors and scientists better incentives (especially, around ownership of intellectual property) and the resources to assemble a great starting team will increase their odds of successful translational research. Securing core intellectual property is often handled well now and there are a variety of good models for tech transfer that can be copied; team formation, instead, remains a challenge with limited support inside most universities.

Look out for our next post, when we’ll leave the Göta älv to cross the Atlantic and land just one hour off the coast of California, at Stanford University.

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nina capital
nina capital

Published in nina capital

nina capital is a new venture capital firm investing at the intersection of healthcare and deep technology.

marta g. zanchi
marta g. zanchi

Written by marta g. zanchi

health∩tech. recognizing the need = primary condition for innovation. founder, managing partner @ninacapital

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