As Philip tours Amsterdam, he visits the biotech tools startup LUMICKS. Founded in 2014, the firm offers products analyzing the binding interactions between molecules and cells, with applications in drug development, CAR-T therapies, and manufacturing.
Philip sits down with co-founder Gerrit Sitters to discuss the company’s trajectory, the cyclic biotech investment market, and lessons from spinning the firm out from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
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Explore how LUMICKS’ technology helps develop biologics and cell therapies with unique cell avidity data — http://bit.ly/lumicks
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⭐️ ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Gerrit co-founded LUMICKS in 2014 following a PhD at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and co-invented the technology behind LUMICKS’ main products. Gerrit now serves as Head of Product, where he aims to deploy the company’s products to tackle challenges in the life sciences.
🔗 LINKS MENTIONED
- LUMICKS’ website: https://www.lumicks.com/
Transcript
[00:00:00] Intro
Gerrit Sitters: What we add to the table is that we actually can directly measure, visualize the molecular mechanisms in situ two. We also have a technology on the cellular level where we actually measure cell lividity, which is the the binding strength and the cell engagement of cell pairs. Do we believe cell therapy is completely dead?
No. I think it might take a while for it to become bigger. Again, the cell engager space is getting a lot of traction and the a DC space and we’re happy that we can also play in that space. What you need to do in the start is being extremely stubborn. ’cause if we would, if, and Andrea and myself would listen to others in the lab or other people which were using this technology in other labs, they all thought we were crazy and you could never make a company out of this.
Going quick to the markets, having a vision and just going for it, I think are the most important aspects.
Philip Hemme: We have new to a new episode. I’m your host Philip, and on this show I’m interviewing the best Europeans in biotech to help you grow. Car T cell therapies still faces many challenges, and one of them is to optimize the interaction between immune cells and cancer cells. The Dutch startup Lumix has developed a technology to measure the cell to cell affinity between these cancer and immune cells at a single cell level.
So I went to Amsterdam to meet with one of the founder Tet. We discussed Lumix journey from being founded in. 2014 to now becoming one of the largest independent life science tools company in Europe with over 150 employees. We also talked about how the technology works and how it’s shaping the development of cell therapies and advanced biologics.
For transparency, this episode has been sponsored by lumix. So here’s my conversation with Garrett and please hit the like or follow button if you’re enjoying it.
Gerrit Sitters: Alright. Welcome to show Garrett. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome at Lumix, Philip.
Philip Hemme: It’s cool. It’s cool. And thank you for the tour. I’ll show it on the footage. It’s, yeah, and I love, I love the office as well. It’s good. Cool stuff.
[00:02:09] The history of LUMICKS
Philip Hemme: So I wanna start with. Kind of what makes Lumix unique at least when I looked at it.
And then from hearing, I think what, what’s quite amazing is that you went from a basically academic ID to a like commercial, full fledged life science tools company. And one thing also that struck me that you raised like quite well, any SoftBank Vision fund invested, which I don’t know that many, let’s say life science company in Europe where SoftBank is, is in.
So can you just like restart on, on kind of. What’s that story like on the, on the top level?
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah. Yeah. So we are a spin out company from the VU University in Amsterdam. And I think what makes U Mix unique is the, the unique data we provide to our customers. And the data was already acquired on the single molecule level in that lab.
So I did my PhD and also a co-founder, Andrea Canelli, the current CSO, did a PhD. And well, with the data, I was able to publish nature papers and several baby nature papers and why not because per, per se, me, but really the data itself and what insights it gave in the discovery of molecular mechanisms that enabled us to, to, to publish those papers very quickly.
At the same time, we also saw that there was a large demand when Andrea went for a postdoc. After his PhD, he was hired in several or get, got job or job offers in several Ivy League universities with one question, can you make such a tool for us? And of course that, that started to to resonate in his mind.
It is, this data is so powerful and actually the big questions are not in biophysics labs. They’re in the labs of biologists and our developers. So if that’s several things that came together. The founding professors from that lab were interested. Andrea knew our previous CEO, Olivia Hying, which worked for FEI also saw how the impact of structural biology and what that impact had on life sciences.
And also hearing the story of Andrea and the power of this, this data, he got very excited. He had a big vision on bringing this, this to market. And yeah, I joined and with that yeah, the rest is history. We we got some grant funding at the start.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: Sold our first two machines for my brochure.
Built a first prototype with with with funding from the university.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: But sold the first two really from a brochure, took us half a year to install. But those were very successful. Customers were happy. And with that, we got our first investment round, the first series A. Yeah. We actually were completely non-funded until then.
At least not from a VC or,
Philip Hemme: cool. And now, so now I think you are, yeah. You have three products on the market, roughly 140, 150 employees.
Gerrit Sitters: Yes. Install base of over 200 systems. And think in total something like 300 publication has been published. Average impact factor of this obligation is very high.
That’s average. 16. Okay. Which which is, yeah. A data in science of this, this world.
Philip Hemme: How much is not, nature biotech impact factor is,
Gerrit Sitters: yeah, I don’t know. When I was little PhD it’s around nature, biotech. I think the baby nature around 20.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: I think the, the science and nature is more like 35 to 50 but on average 15.
And you, there’s lot, some, some of those high impact ones obviously.
Philip Hemme: That’s, that’s cool. Yeah. I, I like that. Maybe we’ll go after a bit more on the, the founding story as well of like, ’cause I think quite a few in the audience are interested. Like they, in academia, they have an id. Yeah. Which is great. But then how do you do, I mean, I think, how do you do the, the real, the first steps?
Yeah. It’s quite quite challenging and there’s quite some lessons there. But one, one thing I, I also saw, and I was curious, is that I saw that. In the recent one, two years, you had quite a few changes also in the company. I think you, you scaled to even more like I think to 50 employees. You scaled a bit back.
Yeah. The CEOI think changed. So what, what happened
Gerrit Sitters: there? Yeah, so I think in our top we had like 300 employees. Okay. So we doubled in size. Was mainly also due to the fact that we had a bigger growth outlook. And yeah, biotech and the biotech winter also hit us. Yeah. We placed a lot of our systems mainly the, the cell acidity systems in both biotech and pharma.
Yeah. And we’ve seen by the fact that yeah, there was a lot of divestment and a lot of a lot of changes in the biotech market that also our growth potential went down I guess since end of
Philip Hemme: 2022 basically.
Gerrit Sitters: Yes, exactly. And then, yeah, we didn’t yeah, we needed to also change our growth trajectory.
Our outlook and also our spend connected to that. Yeah. So it’s painful, but it’s we’re happy that that we were able to do so.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: And yeah, we still have a good growth trajectory going forward.
Philip Hemme: Yeah. And I guess even in already 2022, you were, I guess not breakeven. Or you, you could be if you reduced cost or you were like far away and you really needed the venture capital coming in.
Gerrit Sitters: Exactly. Exactly. And we’re almost back even now. Okay. So that’s we’re not we’re not that much off anymore. So we also don’t need additional investment. Okay.
Philip Hemme: Yeah. Okay. That’s, that’s good. Yeah. We may, I think we’ll talk also about it. I, I’m also, and we had two different tools, company on the show, European Tools Company Emper, he know, and and DNA script.
And was, was interesting the model of like, one completely bootstrapped and never took venture money or even investor money and won, like fully VC based a bit, a bit more like, like you guys and probably raised even more which was interesting. The, the model we can, I think we can talk about this a bit later, so on how you look at it and what fits for whom and what kind of case works.
[00:08:33] Visualizing microscopic interactions
Philip Hemme: But before I, I want to go a bit more into the, the actual product and the science and, and what it’s, and what the use cases are. Because I think. Interaction, I mean, cell cell interaction protein, protein interaction. Obviously it’s like one of the main thing biologists want to know and want to understand, but I think there’s quite a few like options.
Yeah. So could you kind of walk through of like your products and how it plays itself into the, the available options?
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah. So if we look at the, the technology which we started with, with lumix, the CA, that’s really positioned in a discovery workflows. And it’s basically placed at understanding the mechanism of these biological biological mechanism which the customers are interested in.
So if you look at the full workflow, we see like genomic feeding and also like mass spec to, to, to understand which molecular actors are playing a role in, for instance, the biological mechanisms such as DNA repair.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: At the same time, once those actors are known, people want to understand what are the, what are the roles of these actors and how do they actually.
How does, how do they, for instance copy or repair the DNA? Yeah, and well, everybody knows probably these biology cartoons where you actually see in a certain frames, which, which proteins do, which all and then lead to a certain outcome. Yeah. And that’s then the molecular mechanism, which they try to understand how it works.
Well with, I think genomic screening. You can get the, the actors which are involved. Then you have like molecular the IOEM or a structural biologists, which actually look at those individual proteins, look at the structure from which they try to deduct the function. And you have a lot of these binding assays like S-P-R-M-S-D, which look at, okay, which of these actors bind to each other?
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: And with that data, people try then too. Construct What is the molecular mechanism?
Philip Hemme: Yes.
Gerrit Sitters: What we add to the table is that we actually can directly measure, visualize molecular mechanisms in C two. So what we can do is we can grab a DNA molecule, we can add fluorescently labeled proteins to that we can all the DNA molecule still.
So we can actually sense what the distance and the portion of DA molecule is. Yeah. And then for instance, the DNA molecule gets repaired or a nucleotides gets incorporated. If it’s replicated, you can actually sense a single base pair being incorporated into the DNA molecule. So we have a very sensitive way to hold molecular molecules still.
And at the same time we can with single molecule fluorescence measure what happens. On the email molecule, so we can see multiple actors buying to the molecule, potentially copying it, changing the structure. Yeah. And that’s how we can actually directly visualize those molecular interactions, it molecular processes our customers interested in.
That is for the discovery side. And obviously once you have discovered, for instance, how such a mechanism work, you can also add small molecules or change the conditions to see how, for instance, a small molecule interacts with that molecular mechanisms to really understand the mechanism of actions of your drug in real time.
Yeah. Wow. That’s on a molecular skill. Yeah. We also have a technology on the cellular level. Yeah. Where we actually measure cell lividity. Mm-hmm. Which is the, the binding strength and the cell engagement of cell pairs. Yeah. So what we do there is that we have a monolayer of target cells. Yeah. Which can be healthy cells, but also for instance, tumor cells, the tumor cells.
We have we in insert immune cells or cells coated with cell engagers, we let them incubate land on that monolayer. Yeah. And then we apply a force either acoustics that’s done in the Z movie or centrifugal that will be done with our video product.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: And with that we apply a force, very well controlled, and then we actually see at which force do these cells unbind.
And it gives us a very good view on how, what is the engagement of that immune product with the target. And I, some sometimes compare to like, for instance a real soldier, how you want to know. Ultimately you want to develop an army, which. Defeats the enemy.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: And the engagement of the enemy or the, of that army is very important.
How actually that enemy is able to to feed the army. Yeah. If it’s too aggressive and shoots basically all the bullets and the grenades on the first enemy it will not be successful to reengage, reengage again. So you don’t want to have too aggressive immune therapy could also cause toxicity
Philip Hemme: and your problem in the car ts.
Yeah,
Gerrit Sitters: yeah, exactly. So that, that, that engagement is very important. Also, too low engagement also does lead to issues and so we can actually measure that engagement very well. And that correlates very well with downstream effects of those immune products. Yeah. Yeah.
Philip Hemme: That’s cool. Yeah. And you gave me a bit of a tease and I will show footage as well of like.
Because it’s, it’s actual like big machine and with really a complicated macro fluidics and like in the plate and it’s single cell, which I think is, or single DNA or single cell, which I think is ama, I mean amazing like that you can get to this scale and manipulated and in a reliable and like. I mean, in an industrial basically way and systematic way, in a pretty simple way.
It’s pretty
Gerrit Sitters: It’s pretty insane. Like yeah, I think it’s really cutting edge technology. Yeah. Very high tech at the same time, it needs to be simple. And I think that is the main job we have as Lumix have, is we’re not per se a, a tools company in that sense that we really want to make the data accessible.
And so the technology is really a means to get to the data. Yeah. And any biologist or any op operator in a technician should be able to run these machines and are able to run these machines. Yeah. ’cause that is where ultimately the impact is made. Yeah.
[00:14:29] Improving drug development
Philip Hemme: And also it’s what I found quite interesting, you tell me like in, in what you told me, is like the actual technology to measure could be different.
I mean, you’re not agnostic, but it doesn’t matter too much. What, what matters is the end result. And at the end, the user is also what matters is
Gerrit Sitters: yes.
Philip Hemme: Do I get reliable data? Is there good software to. Like use it. Yeah. If it’s user friendly. Yeah. And then what can I do with my, my data?
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah. And can I run it with the other assays I have in my lab?
Yeah. To all these, to be compatible in that sense. Yeah.
Philip Hemme: And actually that’s a good point as well. I was asking on the, because I also, on the, on these tools, it’s usually, I mean, you replace some part, but usually always also in in the workflow with other ones, whatever the, any sequencing. Yeah. Whatever, whatever, whatever.
How, how do you like kind of. Also, I guess the big challenge is that you have, in theory, you want, you mean a sequencer and you want to do mix and you want like this and this and this, but then you have a budget reality, especially in academia. I can imagine. Yeah. But even as you said in pharma now, I mean the research budget a lot.
As they were, I don’t know, 10, 10 years ago. So how do you place yourself in, in the workflow and, and at what kind of budget level are we, are we talking about?
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah, so for the, for the, for the video. Yeah. So there, we really want we are a, a place routinely in the dark development Okay. Workflows with the Z movie, which was our launching product.
Yeah. In the self therapy space. There, the PU was so low that they were placed at the end of the development workflow when people have whittled down the candidates to a few, and then they really want to understand and optimize those few candidates before they go into the clinic. That’s where it was placed.
Yeah. For the ion. And there we got questions. A lot of these drug developers said, this data is very valuable, but we want to have this data. Early on in our drug development. Yeah. So we can actually make better choices faster. Yeah. So actually pushing it forward into the drug development workflow. Yeah. We do not directly.
Philip Hemme: And that’s where they needed more high throughputs. Yes. Like more. Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: Yes. And there we would add, so there, do we directly replace technologies? Not one-to-one. Yeah. But we do replace in that sense, these des iterative design cycles in the direct development workflow.
Philip Hemme: And what is used currently?
Like what do you actually replace? You replace a machine or is it like, like a pipetting robot or what’s, like, what do you actually replace there?
Gerrit Sitters: So as, so currently what, what people are doing, the dog development space for CAR Ts, for instance, or cell engagers, they have like high throughput cell analysis tools at the start of the funnel.
So think of activation assays, high throughput, Eliza, high throughput killing assays
Philip Hemme: with a liquid handling robot. Yes. Yes.
Gerrit Sitters: So that and the video will be placed in that lab that, that could be placed in the lab at that point as well. Okay. And you would add that data to the data set you also acquire.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: And with that dataset, select better candidates going forward.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: Meaning that you get to your results quicker, with better leads. Yeah. And that. Should reduce clinical trial failures, but also gives you to, gets you to that better lead quicker as you just run less assays in total to get to that endpoint.
Philip Hemme: Yeah. Yeah. I see the value. And, and how, how measurable is that value? Like is it
Gerrit Sitters: like Yeah, so there is so I think the, the, the real value we now can show for is all, all the publications being published. Yeah. So with over 50 publications, but also various patents doc development and doc dark patents, which include Avidity data.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: And with those publications it shows for instance, that using avidity and tuning you can get to Safe, for instance, car Ts, which are then going into the clinic or more potent Car Ts. And so the proof we have is in those publications. We’re now working with various companies, also pharma companies.
’cause now we got the video, we can actually now start killing. Large panels and we’re now actually screening large panels to really show if you have those f you’d have this data connected to the other data, which candidates would you select
Philip Hemme: and how
Gerrit Sitters: does it improve your development funnel? And also tie in ROI to that, and that’s currently in, in the works.
We already have shown, for instance, in the study, retrospective study, which is a study conducted with UCL on the April Carr, which failed actually in a clinical trial. Okay. And then we went back so understandable, also added avidity analysis to that to that to that study. And with that data, people could have actually prevented that clinical trial failure because it did not show significant higher binding than the control.
Philip Hemme: Yeah. So you’re really adding a, a layer, not just a layer of data, but really a like a quality of data. Yeah. Okay. My question was more to the speed because it’s. I feel like a lot of tools, companies, okay, we make it faster. You will save money, but you make it faster. Sounds good. But like it’s sometimes hard to actually measure.
Is it like a 10 x improve, like a 10% improvement? 50%. A hundred percent. Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah. So to be honest, we cannot put numbers on that. Okay. Right now. But what we now enable is that customers can actually measure this unique data points. Hmm. At starting funnel throughout the drug development workflow and with that, make better choices.
Yeah. And well, it’ll take of course, obviously time to also prove, yeah. How did that lead to better clinical results, et cetera. Yeah, yeah. I think from the, from all the publications we see and from all the KOLs, which now actually sellability c as an accepted metric and see it as a valuable metric, just running it alongside the other assays they run and they, they are on board.
And now working with industry, we also want to get it routinely in there. Yeah. Workflows.
[00:20:33] AI and digital labs
Philip Hemme: I like that. I had two, two, like, two, two points. I wanted to, to jump into one or what you mentioned. I think one is a bit, a bit faster to answer is I guess also today compared to, let’s say five to 10 years ago, in terms of the amount of data you generate.
I guess today, AI or whatever you you wanna call it, but just it’s, it’s much easier to analyze this kind of data. So it’s, I guess it’s not a challenge. It’s actually re an asset to, to generate like different layers of data and the quantity of data. Yes. And I guess it’s also kind of semi-automatic.
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah.
Yeah. And that’s also the trend we’re seeing. I think we’re also trend we’re seeing in industry Yeah. Is that more and more companies are embracing the complexity of these drug development. Yeah. And so to be honest, there will not be one metric Yeah. Which will tell you your immune products will be successful.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: And biology is very complex. The the immune system is very complex. Cancers are very complex. So all that is multiple layers of complexity. So having relevant information and also AI models. To actually make those connections. And we see that now being used in industry and they’re looking for unique data to power those AI models and unique, high quality, high quality, quality data.
Everything in ai, you need high quality data. Exactly. And we have Sure, everything data points on the cell level and also on the molecular level.
Philip Hemme: Yeah, I like that. And I’m curious also on the, because I can imagine then you really, as you said, AI models, what makes me think is actually then you have to develop these AI models.
Is it the pharma in house? Well, typically not that good at software, I guess. Oh, I think what I’ve seen at least do they need to develop their own IR models or let’s say, maybe not now, but in the future, does it make sense that if you say you want whatever affinity. I dunno, maybe the, the sequence correctness, the, I know expression of the, of the, of the car on the, on the surface level, whatever the metric.
And that you, you combine like that basically you combine some of the tools and you develop AI model that like, that you, that you sell to a biopharma and, and you, I don’t know if you do that kind of partnerships and then you can sell the package. I, I’m thinking out loud, but is that, is that
Gerrit Sitters: something you’re like looking into?
Yeah. Yeah. We have, we have had also some conversations with AI labs. Yeah. And so I think this ultimately is like the digital twin on the cell level or on the molecular level. I think that is also where. Ultimately we’ll be going if you would have a digital twin of the cell Yeah. And you can actually start screening dogs in that then yes, it will be you could do a lot of things insco before actually going into into, in vitro and then into so I, I do see that trend happening.
Who’s gonna own that space? I think it’s ultimately, it’s not the the people which make the best model, it’s also the people which have the best model and the best data. Yeah. Yeah. And so we are already thinking in that way is how, how would that look like? I think it’s very hard to tell. There’s a lot of players, a lot of things is moving in the, the field.
But it is an interesting interesting
Philip Hemme: area. Yeah. And even, but I mean, insco is, is one thing, but even the, the in vitro, the XP think, and actually, you know, it’s, it’s a small world, but. Three years ago, between my first company and second company, I looked a lot into cloud labs basically. And what but a, a cloud lab as in like, let’s say a very digitalized C-O-C-D-M-O on certain process where you, you assemble certain type of capability is, let’s say tools.
And you put like five machines together, and then you have the actual software that combines everything, say AI model, but then also the user interface for the client. So let’s say yeah, whatever. Roche doesn’t need to buy the five equipment. They just connect on the MacBook or probably don’t use MacBooks on their browser.
And they just say, okay, I have, I have this protein, I can send it, I ship it to you, run the experiment. Okay, run it five times again. And you just give the data and then they, they go, which I think from a, even from like a. Capital CapEx capital allocation from a speed, from a, from on.
Gerrit Sitters: A lot of levels. Yeah, exactly.
So how do you make the data also more accessible than purchasing it to accessible multiple handles of,
Philip Hemme: and then you economy of scale as well. Yes, yes. But what I realized is that it, it’s still way too early. Yeah, yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: No, so I think also that of course there’s parties which which do that. CEOs and CDMOs.
Yeah. Which typically have that we, we actually offer now with the video on services in house, so people can send Okay. The samples to us. We do okay. We own it and we provide the data back and we also, interpretation of the data, we set also the right experimental design with the customers to understand what is the customer problem.
Okay. How can you actually deploy our tools? To answer the problem and we can’t promise that we answer the problem or they answer the question. But then we, we conduct the study, we share the data, we interpret the data we do that for both our product lines. We see mainly now interest from a video because the product’s not available yet.
Yeah. We do have the prototypes in inhouse and the technology inhouse actually to run those server already for our customer. It’s also how we do application development. And
Philip Hemme: because, and, and at the end, you charge basically per day, per, per experiment, per sample of selling the
Gerrit Sitters: whole machine. Exactly. So it’s lower risk for customers that can actually start use, getting access to the data quicker.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: Obviously we if you had skills then we would probably partner with the CO to make that more success accessible and scaled it in that way. But it’s also for. Developing new applications.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: Because this platform we, we a video on we launched it with a cell therapy application.
The cell engager application we follow, but there’s a lot of other applications people are interested in. And so QC within a product production environment or screening drugs to bound proteins. So there’s a lot of different applications which you could apply use the video for, but we want to, we develop that with real customer problems in-house with them.
They get the data, they can publish early. We understand what customer problem is and we understand how, what the market is, and we can then also develop that workflow on our video on and start offering it to more, I guess
Philip Hemme: iteration is also much faster.
Gerrit Sitters: Exactly.
Philip Hemme: Exactly. Versus shipping a machine, developing a new machine.
Like it’s
Gerrit Sitters: Exactly, exactly. And I think that is also what. If you, what made us successful as Lumix is that we iterated with the market always very quickly. And so our first CTAP was not finished and we went into the market, we finished it with our customers. Also if we develop new applications, we do that with real customer samples on the customer problems.
Yeah.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: And with developing that with customers, we know for sure that we’re developing the right thing. Yeah. And iteratively doing that and customers are very open and willing to do that. Yeah. And that is how we innovate and it’s also how we get to market quick and effective with the products which actually solve customer problems, versus having the perfect technology, which an RD department thinks.
Philip Hemme: Think that there was also to, to the academic found a translation problems and, and we talked a lot, was nano. I mean it was with Philip from Nano Temp.
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah. He had the same approach. Very much. Yeah.
Philip Hemme: Very much like he did it in the bootstrap. So waiting for the revenues, but from the approach of like going to the customer right away and, and really, yeah, we can maybe jump on that as well.
What, what also makes me think is that Unscript had basically same challenge as well of like biotech winter selling. They were only selling the machine. They realized, okay, there’s a lot of hurdle to sell the machine. So now they’re also running in-house for very complicated type of DNA synthesis, also in-house for customers which is a bit of a different model, different business model, but I think it makes also sense for a lot of customers.
And I guess it makes sense even for you from any kind of license. Tools business to have to offer both and to be flexible to, to the needs, I guess. Yeah. And
Gerrit Sitters: once it becomes commoditized, it’s, it’s certain, certain, certain certain maturity, then you can also partner with COL or other ways to, to empower them to do that for customers.
Which which one to use that model.
Philip Hemme: And I like what you mentioned as well, I mean, it’s, it’s not a freemium model like software, but it’s basically like it makes you funnel so much. You, I mean, your, your, yeah. Your barrier to entry or whatever you call it, is, is much lower. Yeah. You can start start and then go up if you like it.
Yeah. Versus upfront, whatever the price. Exactly. I have six digits. Yeah. Closing the sale is, is probably much harder. Yes,
Gerrit Sitters: exactly. I
Philip Hemme: like that. Yeah, it’s good.
[00:29:53] Quality control and manufacturing applications
Philip Hemme: And also talk, I mean the, the, the second topic now closing a bit, the software, AI automation part is, what I like also is that when you started with a tool that is, I guess quite research academic and so really like, like a pathway questions.
But now when you went to, to just experiment on like a, like say low, low throughput, you answered some question on the sale, but now if you go more high throughput, you’re answering, I mean you’re, you are, as you said, you, you go like earlier in the research process, still even on the radar, but then you can also go into manufacturing.
Quality control. Yes. So I guess even from a like, like potential reach, it’s much bigger.
Gerrit Sitters: Like we, yeah, exactly. I think Sellability as a data point, I think as value flew out value chain for customers and from discovery all the way into the clinic. Yeah. And so discovery in terms of understanding the mechanism of action and what dark.
So for instance, a resistance mechanism of a CAR T product was discovered using Avidity by Harvard. So you actually discover why a car. Car therapy is resistant or do why a tumor is resistant to a car car therapy. That of course, gives you new insights on how can I discover or use novel targets to actually overcome this.
Also in the scaling phase, can I select better candidates faster? All the way to deep characterization where you could actually do large types of scaling panels using the, the video on looking at, do my, do my cells binds only to to an how antigen sensitive is this binding? What other factors play a role to this this binding?
Mm-hmm. Then into manufacturing where it’s all about getting to a consistent quality. Yeah. Every batch clinic you could even think about companion diagnostics. Of course it’s way out, but I think that that is the potential of this, this, this, this measurement.
Philip Hemme: Okay. I know. Yeah. It’s also not that far way out.
[00:31:58] Single-cell analysis and CAR-T
Philip Hemme: I mean, from, from what. From my understanding, I talk with a few companies in the, in the single cell space, but I completely underestimated that in the clinical trial development. It’s huge.
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah.
Philip Hemme: And then even when the drug is on the market is also huge. Yes.
Gerrit Sitters: No. So I think the QC in production definitely, because you also can enter that market with an RUO device.
Yeah. And we could place a system next year. Yeah. And we can work with those partners to develop that. And we can actually work with those labs already today if they send cells, and we can work out with that. So I think the QC space is definitely that. If you think about companion diagnostics where you would doing FDA regulatory.
Yeah. That’s, that’s, so that’s, that’s even not
Philip Hemme: as a, as a, as a company diagnostic, but more as a, as a biomarker. That’s quite impressive as like in a clinical trial biomarker on a single cell. And that’s like, I don’t know how many, I mean, basically you have to do single cell for each. Patient, basically, or like hun I mean dozens of single cell for each patient.
But then you, your number of experiments is just Yeah. Massive compared to in a, in a discovery setting I
Gerrit Sitters: guess. No, exactly. I always say you discover a immune therapy and you develop it once. Yeah. But you administer it hundreds of thousands of times. Yeah. So if you are in that manufacturing space, and it’s a good QC test and I think why it is possible to be a good QC test because the assay itself takes you it takes you five to 50 minutes for these cells to incubate and that gives you the data points.
So it’s a quick functional test and it’s basically shows how fit and how well your cells and your batch is actually able to to execute its magnifi action. Then you binding to the tumor.
Philip Hemme: Yeah. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. I wanna go deeper into also cell therapy and, and, and the whole, because the whole manufacturing and the fitness and manufacturing process and the challenges.
But one thing also I’m curious is on the single cell, I think there’s quite a few companies active and quite big companies. I know single one quite well was a Chinese player or Chinese. German, but mostly Chinese. I saw and quite of what I’ve heard and what I’ve seen the Chinese, like they bet big times on single cell Yeah.
Have priority and they, and I think that I don’t, I, a stat that they’re running like high percentage of the single cell globally is run in China. How do you, like, how do you look at it in that space? Like you think is like a different application because you go the affinity or is it like,
Gerrit Sitters: what we see is that a lot of companies go single cell with legacy assays.
So either genomics or proteomics or killing or cytokine secretion. And, and that is, I think, what the big trend is. And it’s a very important trend because then you can actually start getting that data on a single cell and you can speed up speed up your development workflows. ’cause you don’t need to go to huge batches of cells to actually execute your your assays.
Philip Hemme: That’s why like single one Nutanix genomics or this kind of
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah, it’s typically legacy assays then to the single cell level. Okay. Yeah. And we bring a different measurement, namely how strong do these cells bind, eh, how well do these cells ultimately form a synapse? So it’s a different data point on the single cell level.
Philip Hemme: Okay. Yeah. Okay. So you’re kind of more like there’s an overlap with them. I guess they could develop a affinity test as well and
Gerrit Sitters: Yes,
Philip Hemme: yes. Enter it in the whole workflow, but
Gerrit Sitters: yeah.
Philip Hemme: Okay. So they can kind of potential acquire you. More than, oh, like develop it themself and Yeah. And compete with you directly or acquire you and who, who is actually doing like, single cell affinity?
Like is there someone globally, like
Gerrit Sitters: There is there is companies which are doing that. But typically it’s it’s not cell cell. So single cell affinity would be a cell where you actually look at the binding of proteins to that cell. Okay. But again, it is then a single pot, which you look towards binding.
But if you think about the cell cell context, it’s not only the car molecule.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: It’s the easy molecules, it’s core receptors, it’s multiple car molecules. So it’s really, and it’s about the interaction between these cells, which actually drives downstream function. Amount of receptors of Exactly. So it’s really the integrated binding, all those interactions, which also happens in the body.
So in that sense, the, the in vitro, in vivo relationship is much stronger there than, for instance, affinity on cells. Okay.
Philip Hemme: I see. Yeah, because otherwise you would, I guess you could, let’s say for a CAR T or CD 19, CAR T, you would typically isolate the CD 19, put it on the, on the beats, I guess, and then put your car and your, your, your T-cell and you can measure how many connect.
Yeah. But I guess
Gerrit Sitters: do a tetramer assay where you look at coated arm bes, yeah. Add different, I guess it’s way less precise and it tells you a important metric. It’s like how many car Ts are better than, how infected are they? But we’ve seen that, that is one of the elements we pick up with s lividity.
And so it’s a combination of affinity, abundance of the molecule. It’s also this, this, this, the fact that they are embedded in the membrane also changes the, the binding between these, these cells score receptors. It’s a, these molecules, it’s actually that whole combination which drives the downstream function.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: And if you think about the what’s. If you look at how cell therapies themselves or cell engagers are are changing over the last decades, we started with the first generation of cars, which is in principle a very simple molecule. You have second generation, first generation. You now have logic gated cars.
You have tri specifics. You have, if you think about what is happening is that they are engineering how these molecules typically bind more selectively to the target. So somehow they’re engineering their binding
Philip Hemme: binds and the reaction to the binding, they’re looking at
Gerrit Sitters: downstream effects of the binding.
Yeah. And so what we offer them is directly measuring the effect of how do you change now your binding, what your engineering Yeah. Very direct manner. How does that actually relate then to functional binding, which you want to improve? Okay. So we close that loop very quickly and that actually enables customers to very quickly.
But the logic
Philip Hemme: gating, isn’t the logic more like. There is a binding and what happens after the binding more than the, like the, the strength of the binding.
Gerrit Sitters: Or some logic also. The logic, yes. But we also not only look at the strength, but also the time it takes to bind. And how selective is the binding, for instance, to an antigen low antigen media.
Antigen high,
Philip Hemme: yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: Level. And also a healthy cell, which might have different molecules on there than a tumor cell. So with that, you can actually prob all the different combinations very quickly. It’s
Philip Hemme: crazy. Our whole discussion actually always, it’s, it’s fascinating how biology is complex. I mean, you mentioned it with how, how complex it is but it’s also fascinating how, how much progress we’ve made to like, to go to really one level down and really tests.
Yeah. Not even just isolated and, and as in CCO or in vitro, but actual, actual cells.
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah. If you look at the progress, it’s been amazing, you know, for, I think also the, the impact it has had. Yeah. But I think every time, and it’s how also research works and DR. Development works every time you, you make a step, you and then you, and you answer one questions, you get five new questions.
And that’s what we help our customers ultimately to resolve.
Philip Hemme: Yeah. I like also makes me think about the, the impact of tools. On, on drug development, I mean, on, on biology research in general, but also in drug development. It’s really huge end. Like you look in the past 50 years, it’s, it’s huge. I mean, we talked about, I think also with, with with Philip from Netburn on the impact quite a lot.
And, and one thing that always struck me also on in terms of impact is that we talked out impact factor, but basically most of the most cited papers are tools. Yeah. Crisp methods.
Gerrit Sitters: Yes,
Philip Hemme: yes. Whatever, whatever, whatever. Also most, I guess most of the number prices as well. Yeah, yeah. Which shows also the importance of of
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah.
Technology and scientific discovery always goes hand in hand. Yeah. Yeah. I think of the telescope or the microscope. Yeah, exactly. And it’s just is going on and on. Yeah. So yeah, you need technology to, to bring research further and the research which creates you questions and then Yeah, of course adds a trade cycle in that sense.
Philip Hemme: Yeah. And in a way it’s kind of the, the. Like the general all, but I think it applies here well, that you cannot improve something. You cannot measure.
Gerrit Sitters: Exactly.
Philip Hemme: Yeah. Yeah. It’s just very hard to measure, but also very hard to improve, but I guess very hard to to measure. Yeah. It’s crazy. And, and, and that’s a good also transition to the cell therapy part because it makes me realize also how, I mean, I mean, you said it’s, it’s quite basic, the first CAR T, but it’s already like insanely for me.
It is already like kind of science fiction that it works, it’s extract T cells story engineer you, they express, you re-injected deeply the immune system of the patient. Yeah, yeah. And it gets you to whatever, 90 plus percent remission rate. Yeah. Almost super hard to treat terminal cancer. Okay. Mostly liquid cancer, but still like, yeah, it’s insane.
Yeah. All the cost is very high as well, but it’s going down over time. But what yeah. And, but can you talk a bit about the, or like maybe just not on your, I mean, what you’ve seen on like, on what’s coming of like how, how much. Ba basically what I see is like, okay, the first cat is here, and now you try to go much more granular into, okay, new, new targets.
Okay, what’s the new, like, what’s extra? The affinity, how much it’s expressed. So logic, getting everything, like, can you talk a bit on like what’s the, like some of the major developments there? Yeah. That you have enabled or not like? Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah. So I think what we I think it’s well known that I think CAR T has been successful and cell therapies have been successful on the, the blood tumors and liquid tumors.
So, and solid, solid tumors, it’s still very challenging due to you need to get towards the tumor. You have this hostile microenvironment, the tumor heterogeneity is there. So all this factor makes it very, very difficult. And I think that’s what’s where the, the most of the, the research and the, the, the, the field now is going towards, yeah.
Which is then obviously tackled with better immune products. Yeah. And safety is also something which is a challenge ’cause the antigen does not only get expressed by the tumor, but also of often somewhere else in the body.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
That’s why the CD 19, they were kind of lucky that it’s specific and
Gerrit Sitters: accessible and Exactly.
So it’s also becomes more intricate in that sense that you want to have so for CD 19, if you have the highest affinity often it’s fine.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: For this study on the, on a solid tumor show that two high affinity also showed high affinity on healthy tissue, and then they actually tuned the affinity down to the level that you have still significant affinity towards the tumor, but non, non-significant.
To the health tissue and that is actually a, a CAR T therapy, which is now going into the clinic. And so. I think those those things depend on what complex, what the what the challenge at hand is and understanding how it works. And then you can use this, this, these insights very well to then optimize and select the best therapy.
And the other thing we are seeing is that I’ve heard the cell engages field is now something which is getting more and more hot. Yeah. Where you basically selling, but, or like Yeah, yeah. Selling, yeah. Cell gauges in general specifics or Yeah. Specific bispecifics bytes. Yeah. We’re seeing that that is optic, is getting there.
I think mes was, is it’s a bispecific. Exactly. Yeah. They actually also have they also have what acquisition? Yeah. Yeah. AC acquired by Gen Mapper is just but most, but yeah. No, exactly. And they are so, and, and there we also see a direct fit for our technology. Why? Because what does this, what does do.
What does a cell engager need to do?
Philip Hemme: Yeah. Buying specifically multi targett. So then you multi targett, I guess having the actual cell is much better than
Gerrit Sitters: Exactly. And that’s what we’re directly measuring.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: We, there are some amount we don’t have that much proof yet. In that field was mainly due to the limited throughput of of the Z movie.
With the video on, we do have the fu booths to also play an important role in the selling gauge development.
Philip Hemme: And I guess it’s, in this case you put the bispecific on the beats, but I it’s not that complicated to, to,
Gerrit Sitters: you can add, add it to the beat or you can do cell on the cell and just go incubate or express
Philip Hemme: it on the
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah.
Yeah. So you, so the assay is basically you have your monolayer of tumor cells again, or healthy cells you flush in your immune product. Yeah. And you can do that either. Co incubate it with your s engagers. Yeah. Or you flush them at the same time into the, the chip. Yeah. And then, yeah, you can do that with different consultations.
Yeah. And then you can look at how does my s engager Yeah. Alter the binding in the first 20 minutes or towards your immune product.
[00:46:13] LUMICKS’ future milestones
Philip Hemme: Well, I guess what I’m thinking about is like, ’cause. Again. Also, I think we discussed a bit before, before hitting the record button is like, worked a bit in the field and, and one thing that I remember was really tricky with the put in, put interaction was like actually getting, expressing the targets in the right confirmation, especially complex targets.
But in your case, I mean if you’re just, I mean just, but if you’re taking a tumor cell, the target is already expressed natively and then manufacturing the bispecific is way easier and you know which conditions you need, I guess then you Yes. You have actual binding Exactly. Even if you don’t express it on the cell, because I mean, most of the specific are not expressed on cell No.
As as a therapies. Yeah. Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: Now, and then you could use, and that’s also what we have we’ve, we’ve done is that you can also use and pot goes beads. Yeah. And then do that to, to scan new membrane targets. Yes. That’s cool. Yeah. That’s cool.
Philip Hemme: I like that. Yeah. I, okay.
[00:47:13] Cyclic biotech market
Philip Hemme: Maybe on the, on the, on the outlook on, on ux, I’m curious on like, like what’s the outlook or like, one is kind of what’s the total addressable market is a, is a bad term, but like what’s the potential look like?
I don’t know if you, what you’re communicating in, I think you have communicated like a number of researcher, a number of experiments, but also I guess it translate to revenues. But what, what’s kind of the, the, the potential there, there, what’s,
Gerrit Sitters: yeah. Yeah. So in, in terms of growth trajectory, we see a double digit growth.
Okay. Towards annual double digit growth towards 20, 20, 30, 20 35. Okay. Yeah. And how do we enable that? Is by going to market with new applications and new use cases based on our platforms. Yeah. There is multiple applications. We’ll launch a new Evon versus will be the cell therapy application.
Then there cell engage applications and there’s. Short and a long list on applications to follow.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: And by doing so, we add addressable markets. You add use cases and you expect and we increase the utility of the systems in the field. Yeah. Yeah. Fair.
Philip Hemme: And what’s the kind of 12, 24 months, there’s a milestone.
You just mentioned some, but what, what’s kind of the timelines
Gerrit Sitters: to, for the video to Yeah. For
Philip Hemme: Even as a company, what you have in the, kind of in the pipe for, let’s say by end of next year or, or the year after in terms of product equity milestones.
Gerrit Sitters: Yes. Yeah. So I think a a, our biggest next milestone is to, to get the, a video systems into the market.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: And that is, will be halfway next year.
Philip Hemme: Okay. First half of next year. Yes.
Gerrit Sitters: Yes. First half of next year. And we’ll launch them with the cell therapy workflow, and you can already start using them for cell, engage your work, but it’s not a fully workflow yet. And then the cell engage workflow will follow a year after.
Okay. And then we’ll have. Added applications every half year to a year.
Philip Hemme: Okay. I wonder if people are watching are also interested. They can, they can reach out. Because Yeah, I think, I mean,
Gerrit Sitters: and if we have other applications, which we don’t serve with our technology yet. Yeah. We’re very interested to get into contact with these researchers because we can run projects in-house.
Yeah. And we can develop these applications. Yes. System kind of could develop, with, could develop these applications. So there could be even applications which are not on our roadmap yet. So those those also are options where we are very interested to talk with these, these parties. Of course. Yeah.
Especially if it has a dark development aspect aspect to it. Yeah. We’re very interested to it. I
Philip Hemme: like
Gerrit Sitters: that. To explore that
Philip Hemme: on the, on the industry. There’s a few topics when we, and seeing us all the time. We could talk for forever, I think. Which is a good sign. Time flies is a good sign. But the, I’m curious, I mean you talked biotech winter, I think there’s also like a cell therapy winter.
Yes. Combined. You talked about solid tumor. Remember we had, we had Adrian from Adaptimmune on the show, which basically the first engineered Yeah. Solid tumor cell therapy and he was on the show and the six months after the company is almost bankrupt. Yeah, it’s crazy. And from 500 employees to almost zero market cap now, I think it’s like $30 million.
Crazy. Yeah. Which I didn’t see coming at all, especially, I mean, they got approved, there’s a market, everything. And then on, on the other side most of the cell therapy companies, they know they trade at cash or below cash. Yeah. Maybe except maybe the, the very big ones. How, how do you like Yeah.
How do you look at it? I mean, not just how it impacts you, but how do you look at it? Like what Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah. I think, do you see, I think the certain breakthroughs are needed in that space. Yeah. If it really becomes economically viable.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: So I think and, the conventional pharma set up where you have, and they’re set up to produce small molecules, proteins.
I think that that way of working is not directly applicable for cell therapies. I think there’s a lot of promise, but ultimately needs to become commercially viable for these products to become yeah, widespread.
Philip Hemme: Okay.
Gerrit Sitters: That I think people have underestimated, or, and there was also a lot of, lot of money.
It was a bit of a bubble. And I think that, that, that that bubble disappeared. At the same time we are seeing a lot of, lot of. Things still happening in the academic space. Yeah. And we’re also seeing different models picking up where actually public funded initiatives start to start to exist, where actually it’s more decentralized and there’s other parties which actually are starting to administer the cell therapies.
So how that plays out it’s of course uncertain. Now, do we believe cell therapy is, is completely dead? No. I think it might take a while for it to become, to become bigger again, et cetera. If you look at these market reports in 2019 about how big cell therapies would be in 2032, almost hundreds of billions of euros, which is definitely not come to fruition.
But yeah, I think it’s, it’s, it’s, as any bubble is that it’s not per se that the technology and the impact will not be there. Yeah. I think it’ll take longer.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: At the same time we are seeing that, for instance, the cell engage space is getting a lot of traction in the a DC space and we’re happy that we can also play in that space.
Yeah. So we are still wanting to serve the cell therapy space, and that will be academics and industry partners. And we see that by serving that hopefully also that that will also become a, a better go of market. And, and we’ll be we’ll be in the cell therapy space the cell engage space as well.
And obviously adding more applications. And with, we’ve had two product lines and also the different applications with with a video on. We will also be able to manage those uncertainties in the going into the future.
Philip Hemme: You’re also a bit, you, I mean, you are, you are spreading your risk as well. Exactly.
You’re spreading your bit. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. I think, I mean on, on, just to add a bit of context also for the, for the audience, I mean on, on CAR T and self therapy, I remember because. Kind of when I, I started lab biotech. That’s basically when cell therapy started. 2000, I started 2012, but then like, let’s say 20 16, 20 17, that’s really when the first Camery data came out from Novartis and Kite and Juno.
And, and Kite was, I don’t remember the acquisition price was whatever, 11, $12 billion journal was similar, like some crazy numbers, some early stage stuff. Therapy started with, with literally a nature paper and raising, we had
Gerrit Sitters: in principle also owe that wave in that sense because we had an immune ecology product, which we could could, could, could we, you know, add value for that self therapy development.
I did. Complex.
Philip Hemme: Yes. If the whole, if the application grows the tool seller Exactly like the gold digger. Yeah. The Nvidia of the world picks shovels. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if the application goes down, then you sell less shovels as all. Yeah. Yeah. But that’s, no, I mean that’s the kind but still, which was, or I think the kite product is even bigger.
I have a, I have a blank on the exact, what’s the commercial name? The Kim Kimia is a Okay. Have a blank. Anyway, I will put it in, in post the, there’s the, the ti product in the kite. Yeah. I mean the two, but there are still, I think they are in the billion dollar range now. Berg was range, which is, but what
Gerrit Sitters: I heard amount of therapies is still quite limited because has this billion, but it’s 200 K per 200 K per a million per per
Philip Hemme: but yeah, per user.
But like in rare disease it was the, the price per unit Yeah. Matters, but. At the end of the day, as a farmer, as a, as a, as a conversation, you want to see the total return and what’s your margin. And I think it’s pretty good. But what I heard is, I, I talked to the head of, from, from Novartis, he said like, it was very, very difficult to reach the, even the 500 million bar.
And of course the estimate from analyst, even intern in the estimate was like 10 x. What was a bottleneck then during the, like, the pricing was insane. The manufacturer safety the logistics and then the competition, everyone went into CD 19. So you had like three different CD 19 at the same time and is very good at conversation.
Novartis is really good. And then there’s a third one I forgot. Basically fighting for market share like crazy and you divide the market by three and, and then, and so yeah. Told me that he got a lot of gray hair. So, but, but yeah. But yeah, that’s I mean that’s, I think also if you look at, zoom out a bit on, on biotech, I think at the end, biotech is a cycle.
Economy is a cycle. Exactly. Yeah. Biotech is a cycle. Technology. The cycles people believe, believe less. But I think also what you said is like there’s some scientific clinical hypothesis and data’s exact, but sometimes the science and the big term or the clinical just works less or the economic, the, yeah.
So economics works less wrong work in the end and you don’t know it. No, upfront. So I’m thinking, I mean, cell therapy is one or gene cell gene therapy, but I think in microbiome, I mean, I remember it was 20 16, 20 17 microbiome forms and crazy and there’s literally nothing. Yeah. Literally, no. I mean, there’s a few companies still, and we, we had the, we had done on the show and Sirius I think is kind of almost approved, but basically like, yeah.
Also it’s, it’s went to all new, you
Gerrit Sitters: cannot predict it beforehand. I know. It’s, yeah. I think you also need to have a a strategy as a company which, which can manage those uncertainties. And I think that is something, especially as
Philip Hemme: a tools company, you don’t want to be dependent on your mother. Exactly.
Exactly. As a, I mean, as a drug developing company, you also don’t want to be too dependent, but that’s really hard to do. Yeah. I, you can do a BioNTech playbook of like, okay, I’m agnostic of the technology. Mostly oncology and everything in oncology, but like you need a few billions to do. Yeah. But I like that as a tools company.
I’m seeing the, the times. I mean, I, a lot of other, other, but I think we covered quite a lot of, of, of what I wanted to cover maybe on the, on the cycle, also on the tool cycle. I’m, I’m curious ’cause biotech winter is one thing. One other thing that I saw, I think is a, is a Goldman Sachs report that, that said that the, the inter the investor interest in the space was low, at least in, in 2025.
Yeah. Like do you. Do you see that? Do you like? Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah. So I think, I think it’s also related to that to that, to the COVID boom, but also I think the multiples are just very low currently. Yeah. Okay.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: And the multiples balls has been, were skyrocket, are rocketing. We had like multiples of 20 two years out in the 21 to one peak, 20 x 20 x, which was revenues are crazy and 20 X revenues are.
Yeah. And even companies, which, which without IPO without any profit, a lot of these companies disappeared by now because it’s not so simple to get to a decent amount of revenue. Yeah. And you know, okay, getting to invest, getting to a pitch deck is a bit, a bit easier, but, so investors were burned basically.
I think a lot of investors were very burnt and the multiples in my view are still a bit too low now. So yeah, I think should be around more like seven x if you really have a, right
Philip Hemme: now, how much we fucking work.
Gerrit Sitters: Four x. Okay, that’s great. I think more like seven, eight x is more maybe where it should be in between.
Yeah. 20 x is probably not gonna happen anytime soon again. Yeah. So I think we’re now just at the, the ne the, the bear at the bear the bottom. Yeah. And hopefully that the sprinkle start and also the multiples will go up. IPOs will go a bit up, and then the typically investors get positive again.
Philip Hemme: Hopefully yesterday, the, the fibrous from from farming said he, he sees the first signs of the biotech spring coming. Yeah. I, I in had over a hundred and like,
Gerrit Sitters: I’ve heard it also one year ago, so it’s taking a bit long.
Philip Hemme: I heard about the bio spring coming since end of 2023.
Gerrit Sitters: I actually actually presented that, oh, I think one and a half years ago internally to a team that spring is coming.
So I I’m not doing that anymore.
Philip Hemme: Forecast like, yeah. Yeah.
[01:00:15] Gerrit Sitters’ career takeaways
Philip Hemme: So it’s, and maybe switching a bit, I mean on the, a bit on the personal lessons, just a bit. And then I will finish with a, with a quick fire. Like I’m wondering a bit, and it’s connected to what you say or or what we discussed before, like. The first phase, like what, what did you really learn on that first phase of like going from your, let’s say, PhD to first sale prototype sales raising the first round?
Because I think that’s really the critical phase and that’s, I, I would, I mean, I don’t know if it’s the hardest phase, but one of the hardest phase, I would say phases. I mean, everything is hard. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty the hardest. What were some of the, the takeaways from your like and maybe something that is Yeah, yeah.
Difficult to others as well.
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah, so I think what, what is, I think a main success dive for Lumix was yeah. Sell something before you actually have it. So really focused style. Yeah. So really we, we focused a lean startup style. We focused on can you already sell your solution before? So it’s very hard for hardware.
Yes. But we had, oh, fortunately we had we had the, the, the lab, yeah. Where we originated from. So we could get customer samples in, we could have people get the data in their heads. So ultimately they of course need to buy into the data. Okay. Okay. Okay. And then we defined the specifications and then we, from that, we could actually sell that.
And then started even by you selling the usage and the data, then selling
Philip Hemme: the machine, basically. Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: Okay. And then we could actually we sold our first two machines. Yeah. And with that we actually could build them. Yeah. It was a right of return. So there was a bit of a risky phase ’cause we wouldn’t have any money.
But that was successful and full focus on making those customers successful. Did it all work at the start now? But if you are honest to customers, you take them along in the journey. They are willing to, to also invest in, in that sense in you. Yeah. And we have made those customers successful in the end.
Yeah. And they’re very happy and they actually bought multiple machines.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: So I think that is a very important element. Another important element is, and it’s also a way to test
Philip Hemme: if you, your hypothesis or your technology is actually useful and valuable. Exactly. Versus, I mean,
Gerrit Sitters: in, on paper, in theory, worst case you find out soon that it’s that you have the wrong products, then you can still make the right products.
Yeah. If you make the wrong products and then you go into the market, you have a bigger issue.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: So it’s also not about being afraid of doing something wrong, it’s about being open of. Doing something wrong and learning from that.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: I think that mindset is very important. Yeah. And you just need to be, you should be risk averse.
It should be. But, but
Philip Hemme: this mindset, I think is very hard to, as an academic, I mean, it, it’s typical like more business startup mindset of like, it ate very fast. MVP it ate very fast. Yeah. Pivot very quickly. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe agile, whatever. Yeah. So how
Gerrit Sitters: did you like have that? Well, I think, I think a important factor was Olivier, which came from FEI.
Yeah. Which actually bought a business sense in there. Okay. And he also understood how do you build a company alive. Yeah. And how, what is a decent margin and how do you sell a system? And as all the knowledge came from him. Okay. Yeah. And well, Andre and myself are fast learners, so we learned a lot and we we also mastered that.
Okay. Quickly
Philip Hemme: yeah. Because I think also one chat, I mean that’s, I was about to, to ask about this because I think it’s, I mean, at the end of the day, the team is basically the most important thing in the company, especially at the early stage. But that’s also really hard to get as an academic. Like how do you find the, the commercial team?
I think maybe in tools, it’s a bit easier to have a commercial profile than saying, I don’t even know in drug development is maybe a bit different. At
Gerrit Sitters: least it’s different type of profiles. But they are, they’re highly educated salespeople in our team. ’cause you ultimately are selling to scientists.
Philip Hemme: Yeah. Yeah. So I, I was saying more in the, in the fi finding the farming team, when you’re looking for someone commercial in the tool space. I’m thinking maybe you have a bit more like experienced operative founders in the tool space. Let’s say whatever the x what you said, X microscope, X thermo, fisher, et cetera.
Versus maybe now actually in drug development you have quite a few experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But usually you’ll have someone who is like 20 years older than you. Yeah. Hard culture fit.
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah. No. So we started actually Olivio had a commercial background. Yeah. So he was able to also to, to, to know what goods looks like in that sense.
And we actually hired one of the co-founders also William William Po, which was our first commercial person. He did not have life science tools sales experience. But he You
Philip Hemme: trained as a kind of late co-founder. You were? Yes. At the beginning, yes. Okay. Yes. Okay. But. What was the C? The C who became the CEO?
Gerrit Sitters: The C, yeah. So the CEO, he joined really at the beginning. He was together with Andrea.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: And myself then, and then William joined. Okay. Yeah. And then the two professors also co-founders. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s, yeah.
Philip Hemme: Yeah, that’s two really good lessons, I think. Yeah. And how much did you have with Andrea?
Did you have this like, entrepreneurship, like mindset? Yeah, we both had
Gerrit Sitters: that. Okay. ’cause I think back in the days there was like a lot of FEDERALIZATION programs. Okay. So I think that there’s been a push in the, in in, in the Netherlands to get academic knowledge ized as we get them into into the, into products.
And we went to these boot camps and we went to these places and it also got us effecti. You
Philip Hemme: found it for 2014. So was the time of all the like, I mean the world YC 500 starter incubators, accelerators, exactly. Was just company up
Gerrit Sitters: in Holland, actually, incubators TTOs came up and yeah, it was actually a bit of a, a trend going on.
Oh, so you went on also on that wave? Yes. Yes. Yeah,
Philip Hemme: that’s good. Yeah. Yeah. I remember, I mean the biotech was also similar when we, we started was the whole, like, everyone was stuck on startups. So you also easier to raise money today harder. No, and I think also, I think it’s harder as a translation. People are more and more aware.
There’s more people who have done it who reinvest. Even Philip invest a lot in, in tools companies, there’s some exits, et cetera. But I think from a, like biotech winter, but startup winter since two, three years is, is hardcore. Like yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah. And, and another thing is what you need to do in the start is being extremely stubborn.
Philip Hemme: Yeah. ‘
Gerrit Sitters: cause if he would, if, and and myself would listen to others in the lab or other, other people which were using this technology in other labs, they all thought we were crazy and you could never make a company out of this. And yeah, I think we, we pulled them. You need to put you need of vision and you need to you need to go for that vision and yes, you can fail.
And I think you also need a lot of luck along the way. I mean, you can feel a lot of times without actually it being all Yeah. So we being, yeah, going quick to the markets, having a vision and just going for it, I think are the most important aspects. And then being lucky around the way along the way.
I mean, one get you to
Philip Hemme: but yeah, success, luck. I mean, some of the luck is out of control, but the, the believing is more in the control. Yes. I think that’s, that’s a good that’s that I think it’s also a very good lesson for, for, for the audience, especially when people in more academic, I mean.
But I always feel also, even, even, even now, second company I think, but the, when you’re at the really ideation stage, yeah. Id are very, I mean a common, yeah, it’s a commodity. In life science, it’s a bit less, you need a bit of IP and stuff, but, but it’s very, very fragile.
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah. But often it’s a technology looking for a problem.
Yeah. And people focus on the technology a lot. Yeah. And you need to focus on the problem and just go out there and speak to people because the
Philip Hemme: value comes from the problem solving, not from the technology. Exactly. And
Gerrit Sitters: if you have a powerful technology, obvious, quite often there are problems.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: But if you only focus on the technology, not on the problem, you’re gonna gonna fail often.
Philip Hemme: And you will not go in the right direction. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. I think that’s, it just makes me think, I mean, I think in the tool space, because some of what we discussed is not a. There is a, like there is some nuances to life science tools, but it’s quite common across different kind of hardware startups.
So I think there’s kind of probably a playbook there in terms of MVP iteration, talking to your customers, selling before you developed that you can kind of, and I think what YC is really good at, and I think they’ve, I don’t know today, I think they’re quite into ai, but like two, three years ago, I think they were saying like they have 20 to 30% of their batch was like biotech life sciences.
And they were really pushing this, this playbook and this like. Learning from others to apply. And I think especially today, all of this playbook is like you can find so much Yeah. Yeah. Online or people who have done it who can really help. Yeah. And I think especially as an academic, I mean, maybe not do all of it, but at least understand this.
Yeah. There’s a
Gerrit Sitters: lot of people which are a bit further in their career, which went through that trajectory before. And they’re very eager to, to coach and help these young people. So also go and look for people which did it already. And can, can can, yeah. Explain them their mistakes and their learnings and help you along the way.
Philip Hemme: Yeah. And finding the right people that help. ’cause there’s also a lot of people who want to help. To help. Yeah. And it’s, yeah, I’ll make sure I had the case. It is somebody with other coach is like, oh yeah. Like yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: If somebody has the credentials that they actually did it, those are the important credentials.
Yeah.
Philip Hemme: Yeah. I had quite a few experience with this, so Yeah. I liked it. Yeah. I mean, I think we could talk also about the, maybe your last one, but maybe a quick one. Just thinking this, this thing about like stubbornness slash resilience of like believing and not like listening, but not changing too much.
But at the same time, what I, and we talked a few times on the show, what’s fascinating is that you. You have to be quite like, not rigid, but quite like, like stuck on a vision and, and like adhere to a vision. But at the same time you have to be also like listening and pivoting fast. Yeah. So, so you have to be like flexible and rigid.
Yeah. And you have to have this like, this like spectrum of choosing, in which case you wanna be just like, widget and I don’t change. And on which case, and I think that’s extremely hard to, to find like, and it’s not like fine tuning. Okay. Now I’m always this widget in this flexible is like super like project decision dependent.
So I don’t, I guess you agree, but more like if you have quick thought about this or how you learn how, like some. How you do it today, how you did it before. What was some of the, maybe some exa, one example of some learnings there? Like Yeah, let me think.
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah, I think so. I think you can always have a, a strong vision.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: But also vision changes.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: So it’s, it’s but I think, I think you can be, yeah, you need to be flexible on different. Different levels. Yeah. So on a certain stage, a you, you don’t want to be divergent on a task and weekly and monthly level.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: That’s not where you to execute, execute, execute, execute. Say, this is the plan, this is what we do, and this is how we gonna execute it, and this is what we’re gonna end up with. Yeah. And then you want to have learning cycles, which might be monthly or quarterly.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: And which incorporate those learnings and then adjust your strategy.
And then adjust your plans. Yeah. And it’s, I think this, this needs to be in balance. And so I think we need to be, you need to be very focused on where do you want to go? What’s the plan? What did I promise to do? And let’s execute on that. That’s a challenge on itself. Well often often things get delayed.
But on the, so I think, I think that is, that is how, how you need to divide that, that, that tension in a way. Yeah. And certain people are better at one than the other.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: Certain people are very well at generating new ideas, doing the first 20% and other idea people are very well in doing the last 80%.
And you also need the teams, which can do both. And you need diverse teams, and you need the right process and the right controls to actually build that as an organization that, that they gets institutionalized.
Philip Hemme: But you as a founder executive, you also need to integrate. I mean, of course you’re always better at one than the other, but you have to be quite good at Yeah, yeah.
The whole, the whole spectrum.
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah. But what I learned, for instance, is that I also really needed to reinvent myself a few times. Yeah. So. As an example, the, the first product for the celebrity product is emo. I was leading r and d team. Yeah. Quite a small team. And it was done, I was pretty directive back then.
And it was really like this is what it needs to be developed. These are needs to be the specifications. This is what we need to do. Yeah, top down this. And we got there. We developed it and we went to market for a success. At the same time also saw that the movie in terms of throughputs and maturity and had some great products, but it’ll never be used on a high throughput manner in these high throughput screening labs.
You really need to get to a level up and also knew I wouldn’t be able to do it myself with this team. We didn’t have the skills and experience to do so, so I also changed my leadership style from being directive to, I need to start. Developing a team which knows more than myself, which actually gets the environment to bring it to a higher level, which I wouldn’t be able to do myself.
’cause I will, on a certain stage, she becomes a bottleneck.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: And that is has been a transition for me to transition from that leadership style to the new leadership style. At the same time, I could build a team and. I’m very happy that by building that team, we were also able to build the video on. And with that, we now also go to market.
And that changes throughout that, that that seller, you have different phases in your, in your company. And it’s not like a small company a big company, extrapolation of a small company. It’s a completely different beast and goes through for different phases. And some people are able to go through all those phases.
Other people, they feel much more, they
Philip Hemme: prefer one phase than the other. Yes,
Gerrit Sitters: exactly. And yeah, you also need to be humble and open and every also open to change yourself and also the company.
Philip Hemme: Yeah. Next I have one, one thought on this, and then we, we start the more quick fires. A quick question, quick answers, but I think, and especially important for, for people listening and especially the whole like podcast books like advices, space.
I think it’s, and that’s why I also like to ask the question in terms of like at what phase it was because I think someone very junior or junior founder cannot apply necessarily something that you have learned over 10 years after 10 years of founding. Like of course some things might work, something might not, but like, but take it by steps.
That’s a bit of the, not a trap, but you have to be careful and especially if you have like younger, like more junior audience listening, you also be careful of like not trying to replicate one-to-one.
Gerrit Sitters: No,
Philip Hemme: no.
Gerrit Sitters: Like,
Philip Hemme: yeah, I think it’s also important. I dunno. Yeah,
Gerrit Sitters: yeah. No, I think what’s, look how investors and other people.
See startups and not young companies, they see the potential, but they also see risk.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: And so I think you need to have a vision which shows the potential as, so where do I want to be in five years time? What does that world look like? Then obviously you’re not there yet. If today you don’t have that company.
So what are the risks involved to get from point A to point B? Be very clear on those risks. Knowing the risk is
Philip Hemme: better than not knowing them
Gerrit Sitters: and talk about those risks, articulate them, and then have a plan. How are you gonna tackle those risks? Yeah. And if you are consciously doing that, you build trust and say, year on time, I, this is my plan.
And then this is risk will either be mitigated or something. I will validate, willingness to pay. I will do all these elements, which actually brings me closer to point B and mitigates the risk I’m seeing now it’s
Philip Hemme: based of A,
Gerrit Sitters: B,
Philip Hemme: C, and Exactly.
Gerrit Sitters: And that if you build that up and you show what you presented before, show the progress, show what you did, and then you build confidence and this is how you also, and then also.
And that first step is then the step you focus on, but in the context of where you want to go, and then focus on that first step and focus all your knowledge and all your being and doing that. And that will get you to the first step, step every step by step. Exactly. And you learn along the way.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
It’s a good one. Just I’m seeing the time. You, you have a, a little duffer.
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah, yeah,
Philip Hemme: yeah.
[01:18:01] Quick-fire questions
Philip Hemme: Just if we can do five minutes a quick fire, we will look quick. And actually some of the question we already kind of answered but maybe on the, on the high level, the first one, if you can share one of your Europe if European possible let’s say life science or biotech heroes or mentors,
Gerrit Sitters: Life science heroes or mentors?
Philip Hemme: You don’t need to give the name either, but someone who really helped you. Helped me per
Gerrit Sitters: personally?
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: Okay. And
Philip Hemme: personally career wise, but personally, yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: So career wise, I think our, our, our previous CEO Oli Yeah. I think has really taught me a lot. Yeah. So I think still see him a lot and yeah.
I think was 10 years
Philip Hemme: almost together.
Gerrit Sitters: Yes. Yes. So he, he’s been very important also, like a, a board member, which got me through that phase I just described. Yeah. Going from going from the directive leadership towards this and this leadership where it’s more creating the space, building the team, and in a way, letting go.
Yeah. He truly helped me go through that phase. And that, yeah, that changed me as a person. And I think that yeah, that’s something which also has been very helpful.
Philip Hemme: Good one. One, one mistake you made in the past 12 months.
Gerrit Sitters: Last 12 months. A lot of them last 12 months. I’m thinking further back you can also do further.
You feel that one mistake? I think what we yeah. One, I think one mistake, which we, we which I was also in a way responsible for, is that while going very early to market with your first products you shouldn’t do that per se with your second product. Okay. So, ’cause in the first product, you’re fully focused on that first product and you can spend the effort, all the resources to get that product to work to a certain quality level at the customer.
Your second, and then you build the quality of the first product up. If you then launch the second product with a lower product than the first product. Interesting. The first product will outcompete the second product. Okay. And the sales team will not feel comfortable to sell the first product. So the second product needs to be on the same level of quality as the first product.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: So that’s why you also need to start developing products with higher quality. You can still do that iteratively with customers, et cetera, but that quality level needs to be go up when you launch it. We launched it, yeah. We have launched products which too early, basically too early, too low of quality because Yeah, that’s what we knew and worked well the first time.
I think in hindsight we should have done that later with higher quality. Yeah. And yeah, that has been,
Philip Hemme: I guess especially in, in hardware, in software, you could probably even do it and iterate and change the product over time in hardware
Gerrit Sitters: Yeah. Stuff. Exactly. I think it’s a big one of the bigger learnings.
Yeah, it’s a good one. Yeah.
Philip Hemme: And I guess in the tool space, a lot of tools are some, some hardware components. That’s a good one. Yeah. What’s one of the, a European biotech that stands out to you? Can be a client or not, can be public or like European biotech?
Gerrit Sitters: I think, anyways, I think OUTLIST stands out as being just say one of the biggest cell therapy companies.
Philip Hemme: Ulus,
Gerrit Sitters: yes. Ulus. And also good context there. And I think also willing to deploy novel technology. Yeah. In, in, in the way of working.
Philip Hemme: I’m trying to get them on. I’m talking to them. I know them quite well, so we should be on the show soon. Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: Okay. Or might have context for you there. No, so I think that that is an a in a impressive company.
And I, I think they’re, there’s, there’s companies which in my view, embrace the challenge of getting this immune product to market and then truly not wanting, eh, not seeing it as a simple task. And obviously it’s not simple. I’m not saying that any biotechs all see it as simple, but you have differences in how these, these companies approach user challenges with certain openness and certain willingness to learn.
And I, thinkless is a good example there. Immunocore is also a very nice one there.
Philip Hemme: Yeah.
Gerrit Sitters: Biotech bigger but also very innovative.
Philip Hemme: Immunocore was on the show. Yeah. BioNTech is, was on the show. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I like yeah,
Gerrit Sitters: it’s good. It’s good. Dutch, Dutch part mirrors. Of course’s success story.
So 8
Philip Hemme: billion acquisition. Yeah. It’s crazy. Yeah, it’s good. We talked yesterday with, with subways as well. I think the, on the, on the finished note, on the note of optimism as well. I think the, the European biotech is, even with the biotech window is, I think has, I mean, first has never been as strong, the whole ecosystem.
Yeah. I mean Dutch for sure, but also the whole, the whole ecosystem, which is really good to see also, like things work and that hard work also pays off. Like it’s, yeah, it’s good to see and they, they’re
Gerrit Sitters: gonna make the impact ultimately, so. Yeah. Yeah.
Philip Hemme: Cool. I think it’s a good way to wrap up the conversation.
Thanks a lot yet. Super good. Thank you for coming around. Yeah. Yeah. And good luck with everything. Thank you.
Gerrit Sitters: You as well.
Philip Hemme: Thank you.
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