In our first episode recorded live in front of an audience, we’re with Lovisa Afzelius, the General Partner of the European branch of Flagship Pioneering 🇸🇪
We talk about Flagship, including its European activities. We also talk about company-building at large and Lovisa’s personal journey to be one of the leading Swedish leaders in biotech.
⭐️ ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Lovisa has been an icon in the EU biotech and pharma world for many years having been a CEO, co-founder, president, board chairman, and executive director in many emerging companies. Joining Flagship in 2020, she quickly became the founding CEO of Alltrna, and co-founded and was the CEO of Apriori Bio, Metaphore Biotechnologies, and Prologue Medicines. Lovisa has received many accolades, too many to list here. A few examples include being listed on Inc. Magazine’s Female Founders 250 List in 2024, 2023 saw her featured in the PharmaVoice 100 list of life science industry leaders, and in 2022 she was named one of the Top Women in Biopharma by Endpoints.
🔗 LINKS MENTIONED
- tRNA therapies, Lovisa Afzelius, Founding CEO, Theonie Anastassiadis, Co-founder & CIO, Alltrna: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3JaGad1YednEhExnK4Xl2L?si=7G65_6u_TyeB3Rmn5hzZYw&nd=1&dlsi=4f17dae5cf3f4306
- Agnete Fredriksen, Nykode | Being one of the top 50 women in 🇪🇺 Bio | E07: https://flot.bio/episode/agnete-fredriksen-top-women-bio/
- Flagship Pioneering website: https://www.flagshippioneering.com/
- Otello Stampacchia, Omega Funds 🇮🇹 | Competition, Boston & Pasta | E18: https://flot.bio/episode/otello-stampacchia-omega-funds/
Transcript
[00:00:00] Intro
Philip Hemme: And one thing that’s impressive about flagship is the money you raised. And as you said, it’s expensive to build 106 companies. The last fund you raised was in July. I think it was one of the largest funds ever raised was 2. 6 billion. It is
Lovisa Afzelius: a lot. We have now 14 billion dollars under committed capital.
We have the fund eight of the 2. 6 you mentioned. Special fun together with that on a billion as well. Another billion, you start counting
Philip Hemme: in billions.
Lovisa Afzelius: I truly think that machine learning and AI is now in the place where you can revolutionize how we think about right development already from the very beginning, being in an environment with a lot of support and a lot of very talented people, as many, I would say, female as male role models.
Philip Hemme: Bienvenue to a new episode. As Michel said, this episode is a bit special. It’s the first time we do it on stage, live. Thanks for the partnership with BioEurope. So I’m your host, Philippe, and on the Flood Bioshow, I’m interviewing the best Europeans in biotech to help you grow. One of the best. VCs in the world, and I think many will agree, is flagship pioneering.
They are based in Boston, but they recently expanded geographically and opened a European office. So it’s a pleasure to have Loviza today on the, on the, on the show and on stage. And for today, we will talk about flagship, but especially on the European operation. We will also talk about company building at large and Lovisa’s journey into becoming one of the best Swedish leaders in, in biopharma.
Just a quick practical thing. I will try to open to questions. I want to do it like interactive. We are live here so we can, we can enjoy that. Or someone who will have a mic and I will open it throughout the discussion. So please don’t be shy. It’s a close community. So please give a round of applause to Lovisa.
Hi.
Lovisa Afzelius: Hi.
Philip Hemme: Welcome to the show and welcome to the stage, Lovisa.
Lovisa Afzelius: Thank you so much for having me here.
Philip Hemme: So cool.
Lovisa Afzelius: Yeah. Looks right.
[00:02:08] Flagship Pioneering and their European biotech initiatives
Philip Hemme: So let’s, let’s start with the, the European initiatives of Flagships reopen and technically you’re in Cambridge, US Cambridge, Massachusetts, and you’re opening Cambridge, UK. Can you just start with like how things are going?
Lovisa Afzelius: Yeah, absolutely. Happy to. So as you, mentioned in your intro, Flagship is a venture creation company, right? And it is different from most other venture caps in that, yes, we do raise funds, but we really build our companies and originate them ourselves. And that’s a very creative process. It is really about tapping into ecosystems around the world.
How do we find the best collaborators? How do we stay abreast of the science that we want to work with? And I think that’s the core reason for why we have now started two different offices, both in UK as well in Singapore, so that we can tap into that ecosystem and be much closer to the science because really, you know, science has no borders and it’s really about finding collaborations and, and finding the right people to work with.
Philip Hemme: And, and why the, why the UK versus another part, another part of Europe?
Lovisa Afzelius: Well, I think it could be in many different places and we could potentially expand to many others. It’s a, it’s Cambridge to Cambridge. It’s easy, right? And it also is easy for us to then also collaborate with a broader European scene as well.
In, in the case of, for example, Cambridge and UK. We had one of our launching events in the context of one of the companies, Apriori Bio. And we found a lot of good ways of interacting. That’s a company very interested in vaccines and we, you know, we found very good ways of interacting with local. Agencies, the SEPIs, the governments of, of UK, but also with local startups.
So it’s about finding areas where you have very strong sort of local presence.
Philip Hemme: And I guess as, as we discussed with someone yesterday, I mean, in Europe, when you’re in the UK, you’re very close to the rest of Europe. I guess it’s the same for you guys also in Singapore. You’re very
Lovisa Afzelius: close. There is the
Philip Hemme: region for sure.
That’s good. And I think you started one company, a quotient, I think, out of the, out of the UK. Exactly. Can you talk a bit about, about that one as well?
Lovisa Afzelius: I think that was a quite unique situation where we also, there were some academic co founders that were working on very similar types of biology and it made a lot of sense to bring those together into the company quotient.
And actually, I think that’s something that we sometimes do also in the context of a prior bio, we’ve also sort of work very closely with key opinion leaders in the field. And sometimes just, it makes more sense to do it together as co founders than others.
Philip Hemme: Nice. And can you, yeah. And what is pretty impressive was you, since you joined flagship, which I think was four, four years ago, you launched four different biotechs which.
It’s pretty, it’s a lot. One is, yeah, and maybe can you talk quickly about them, like about the different falls and.
Lovisa Afzelius: Yeah, absolutely happy to. So so the companies that we founded over these last couple of years includes Alterna, which is the world’s first tRNA company Aprior Bio, which is in variant resilient vaccines.
Metaphor biotechnologies, which is really about generative molecular design, and Prolog, which is tapping into the viral proteome. And I would say they are all in very different areas of biology, needless to say, and can, they’re all platform companies. And they’re all, I would say, in that interface between AI machine learning and different types of biology.
So how can we build platforms that allows us to parameterize the space that we’re looking to understand and then apply machine learning to infer those learnings so that we can drive insights more quickly and, and, and get towards the best medicines for patients as soon as possible. Right. Yeah.
Philip Hemme: I think that’s, that’s one thing that is quite special about flagship as well.
[00:06:18] Being creative in many biotech spheres
Philip Hemme: Yeah, you are quite agnostic, quite agnostic or so on, like on what’s the application or what’s the, you’re looking at amazing science and then apply it. I mean, you’re going to therapeutics. You have also industrial biotech, biosolutions, all within the same funds. They’re like. I guess there must be also some challenges attached to it.
Lovisa Afzelius: I think it’s, so science is super creative and we need to be abreast of all the different sort of areas that we could consider going into and really, but it’s also, it’s a lot about thinking about what are the big problems where we want to create solutions to. What if. Yeah. What if. Exactly. What if we could.
Deliver this and that, what if we could use tRNA to edit proteins? I mean, these big, what if questions to speak a little bit about the process we, I mean, we apply a very sort of strong process for innovation and that’s how we can be sort of parallel entrepreneurs because we apply that same process independent of what science it is that we’re going after.
And I think that’s why we can go after such orthogonal. Topics, because we still always keep ourselves to the same standards when it comes to how we actually go after it. It’s like we always want to go after the non adjacencies. We want to go out in the white space. We want to be where others are not necessarily going because it creates space for us to explore and invent and create IP early on, et cetera.
And I think traditionally that’s where, you know, people say that’s a lot of risk to go into those spaces, right? But we, we often think about it different. It’s like a lot of uncertainty because no one has really been there, so you can’t really know what the risk is if you haven’t been there.
Philip Hemme: But it’s an opportunity to be the first, first in class.
The first,
Lovisa Afzelius: exactly. And it’s also an opportunity to rapidly create the data points that are needed to bring down that uncertainty so that you actually understand the space better than anyone else. And then you can start assigning the risk and make a cognizant decision as to, is this worth going after?
Or do I not have the, the insights that I need in order to feel confident that there is actually a path forward in what’s otherwise pretty much white space?
[00:08:37] Why invest 50 million in first seed Series A every time?
Philip Hemme: And one thing that you, about the process as well. Is you’re always investing almost the same amount, 50 million first, first check fully from the flagship fund.
Like why, why this amount? I mean, a lot of people here in the audience, I think if a biotech CEO in Europe, they would dream about raising, raising 50 million as a first seed Series A. Can you talk about why, why that amount? How you like,
Lovisa Afzelius: Yeah. I mean, we start off with explorations. So every year we maybe run a hundred different explorations where we ask these big what if questions.
What if we could build very inter resilient vaccines? What if in the context of Moderna, you could use mRNA to produce protein therapeutics? And many of them won’t go anywhere because you realize that it was a great idea. We just, the time may not be right yet, or the technology is just not there yet to actually make it happen.
But then sometimes you find these ideas where it’s almost like maybe two different technologies coming together for the first time and you see some synergies that you just had never thought about before. And that’s when you start to form what we call a protocol. But it’s a huge. opportunity cost for us to actually move forward at set stage to your point before.
So we don’t take that easily. Instead we Very explicitly decide on a couple of killer questions that we need to answer to move on to the next stage. And then we put a couple of million dollars first into what we call a protocol. And during this time, we recruit a couple of people to help us build the science.
And at the end of that nine to 12 months or so we hopefully have answered those questions explicitly so that we can say that we see that even though we don’t know any, we don’t know that much yet. We at least know that some of those core competent core pieces that we need to put in place for the puzzle to come together seems viable.
And that’s when we start making that bigger investment to actually build out the platform And harden the platform, but then also start thinking about what are all the different potential areas of biology that we could point that platform towards and create prototypes from the platform so that we can see the value creation and we can sort of see what value pools we can unlock.
And really focus it towards what is the biggest unmet need and where do we want to go with it?
Philip Hemme: So I guess the 50 million is more is the total amount of this the whole process plus Once you are going out of stealth mode.
Lovisa Afzelius: Yeah. And that’s something that comes completely from flagship, right? And then when we get to basically series B, that’s when we start bringing in, first of all, an external CEO, I stay on a CEO until that stage.
And together we raise the series B and then the CEO brings the company sort of to the next stage of development. Yeah.
[00:11:42] The Flagship Pioneering business model: invest in biotechs early
Philip Hemme: That’s nice. And I mean, I think I forgot to mention it in the intro, but I’ve, I followed flagships since basically 2014. We talked about, I finished my studies in Boston. I met David Berry, Stefan from Moderna and that’s when Moderna was really taking off and was really originated the flagship and taking off.
And now, I mean, now we We all know the story. And we also know, I mean, the return you made on Moderna is insane. I don’t know. I heard it was like a hundred fold or something. I’m not, I don’t know how you can disclose. But can you talk about the return as well on, on investing so early and I guess having quite some equity as well and What does it mean from the whole like business model of flagship?
What does it allow you?
Lovisa Afzelius: I mean, the business model of flagship is really, as you will say, it’s like really building it from the beginning ourselves. And I mean, that it’s not the easiest way of doing things for sure, because you kind of literally have to stay with it and, and sort of have that vision from the very beginning and work it ways backward.
As in comparison to, if you bring in science from the outside or you invest in another company, we will always know what it is that we have in our hands because we built every single piece of it ourselves. And I think that, that is very, very useful as you’re continuing to build the company. And the way the process is set up, we also have many of the same people following the companies throughout its lifetime.
So even if it is a, it’s a quite hard model as such, I think that is why we can also create the value because of, you know being in it for the long run, because we are truly in it for the long run. We stay through the series B, we stay through IPO and we, you know, these are our babies. So we really stay with them for a very long time.
Philip Hemme: I like that. Yeah. And maybe continue zooming out on the company building model. I think what’s, what’s really interesting in this model, I mean, in Boston, there was you guys were, were, were one of the few who did that very well and quite early. I think third work was another one. Atlas was another one.
And it seems like the model also coming. More and more also European VCs start to do that. I mean, Fabio and Kyoma did a startup studio, Fabio had one. I think Sophie Nova start companies from scratch as well. Like, can you talk a bit on on the model itself? Well, I mean, I’m curious, I’m like, yeah, why are all the VCs, I don’t know, copying you or inspired from you and like, yeah, why so much?
Lovisa Afzelius: I mean, it’s a, so oftentimes, for example, when you join a company, you have looked at it from the outside and you’ve been really impressed with what it is that you see. That’s why you decide to join the company. I must say that when I joined Flagship back in 2020, it was so much more than I had ever thought of.
So it is, we’re now at, I think the last company. I found it was Flagship 107. So it’s like, there are a lot of companies that come in this way. So I think what, what Flagship has really managed to do is to. Build a ecosystem of very, I mean, parallel entrepreneurs. We know how to build companies and we have now so many scientists that come from very different walks of lives within the context of flagship.
And we know how to build platforms and we do it repeatedly, repeatedly and in parallel and in parallel. And those are learnings that. I think a lot of people also look at as inspiration. It takes some time to build up that. That knowledge base, if I may say, but it is great to be in such an environment because if you see everyone else sort of being able to build new companies and create new companies, all of a sudden it lowers the threshold for you yourself to actually come up and create your new companies.
Because you see, it’s possible with the support of the teams that you have there.
[00:15:57] VC-created vs founder-led biotechs
Philip Hemme: And what do you think about the especially in Boston, there is CurieBio and kind of the whole like founder led movement of like, okay, now Pharma, Therapeutics and Life Sciences, VCs create the companies and there’s no really like true biotech founder.
to bring more like scientist founders or founders from outside who get financed and we get like incubated. What do you think about that movement or that, that critique? I feel like it’s a bit of critique of the, yes, the origination model. Like,
Lovisa Afzelius: I mean, I find it hard to tell because it’s very different from the flagship modeling that we are both, you know, the founders, the scientific founders and the company founders.
And that is very different. So it’s hard for me to sort of, Relate too much to the other types of models when you don’t know them so well. Right. But I do see the benefits of, and the, the joy and of actually being both. So you were founder yourself. Yeah. You, you stand at that whiteboard and you come up with the ideas together with your team as to what you really feel passionate about, where you think that you can actually make an impact.
And then you have all that support from the ecosystem to actually push that forward and build companies out of it.
Philip Hemme: So, I mean, yeah, I mean, I think at the end, the two models are great models and it fits for different people as well in different science and different cases.
Lovisa Afzelius: And all we want is to have as much innovation as possible to create the best medicines because that is just an there’s so much unmet need.
So we should just try many different ways of getting to it and, and take inspiration for what you see works, right?
Philip Hemme: Yeah. Yeah. That’s and I think in one thing also that’s impressive, our flagship is the money you raised in the funds. I mean, and as you said, it’s expensive to run and to build 106 company.
[00:17:46] Raising one of the largest biotech funds
Philip Hemme: And the last fund you raised was in July, I think was one of the largest funds ever raised was 2. 6 billion. For one single venture fund. Like that’s, that’s huge. I mean, it is
Lovisa Afzelius: a lot. We have now 14 billion under committed capital and or assets under, under management. And we have the fund eight of the 2.
6 you mentioned and the special fund together with that on a billion as well, another billion that comes with partners such as
Philip Hemme: you started bouncing in zillions. It’s.
Lovisa Afzelius: It costs a lot of money, but it’s, it’s it’s, it’s, it’s also in this environment, it is a phenomenal sort of foundation to continue to innovate in this space.
Philip Hemme: What do you think about, maybe you saw the Forbjorn fund that they just raised a bit over a billion dollars for, which for European funders is huge and starts to be in the seminar ballgame with. What was your what do you think about them?
Lovisa Afzelius: I mean, the more sort of capital we can get into life science, I think it’s just very positive and adjacent areas of innovation.
I think that is just, that’s just positive because that’s what fuels, I think, our economy and that just creates ourselves to be better, better humans as to what we can do differently and how we can. Build new ways of attacking problems, whether it’s in medicine or it’s in sustainability or it’s anywhere.
There’s enough problems to solve. There’s enough, there’s enough problems for everyone. Let’s put it that way. For sure. That’s good.
[00:19:19] Flagship Pioneering’s biggest returns
Philip Hemme: And on the, I had a question yesterday from a London VC. I was telling him that we were on stage and he asked a bit for a catalyst question. I said, okay, but ask, ask your visa.
What were some some other big returns except Moderna?
Lovisa Afzelius: I would say that there are many different ones and we also have, I mean, some count it only as returns. It’s also what is medicines to patients. It’s also partnerships. We do a lot of partnerships now, the Novo Nordisk, we have the Pfizer, we have the JSK.
These are different ways where we’re almost creating what we call an innovation supply chain. Yeah. So that companies that in big pharma, it’s hard to do innovation as such, but this possibility of actually coming to us and looking at that breadth of different platforms that we have, and sort of almost do the matchmaking between these are the target product profiles that the company is truly after, and then being able to look into many of the different platform technologies and see which ones actually works the best for that problem.
And then creating a collaboration around that. I think that’s how you can really fast forward drug development. And, and what’s good about that as well is that, you know, each of these companies spend a lot of time refining their platforms and building the best platform possible through these collaborations.
Everyone in the company learns more about how to do drug development with a pharma company, for example, and you can tap into their depth of, for example, biology expertise in the particular area you’re going after, which is otherwise hard to build in each of these different areas. Companies, which is why we formed this unit within flagship, which is called pioneering medicines, which is basically a drug development unit within the flagship ecosystem that allows all these different platform companies to have access to real world class drug development expertise as well as being almost like the adapter towards the big pharma.
Well,
Philip Hemme: you centralize BD as well in a way, it’s very much more efficient, I guess.
Lovisa Afzelius: Yes, and instead it’s the same thing that Instead of every single platform company building their own BD function, their finance function, their legal function, we have those as central capabilities. So we can have very, very skilled folks in each of those groups.
And then you have the possibility, even as a very small company to work with very experienced people. And, and that’s super helpful, people that have done it before. So it’s, it’s a lot of, that’s sort of part of the ecosystem process. We, for each of the companies, we recruit those scientists that are critical.
Philip Hemme: And on the returns, you didn’t know, you didn’t know your ends. Some examples except, except Moderna. What was the, the homework? I
Lovisa Afzelius: mean, I think we have, what is it now? Six, or, or, I, I don’t even I, I don’t wanna quote numbers because I don’t wanna get the numbers wrong. But I think we have multiple different public companies that are out there right now and the full sort of ecosystem of earlier companies that are coming through.
Some that have been acquired within big companies and a lot of partnerships as well.
[00:22:36] AI and biotech
Philip Hemme: Okay. I will have one more question and then I will open up to any of you. So don’t be shy. Prepare. You have time to prepare your question. One thing you mentioned was machine learning as well. And I think, I mean, you guys, and I read Nubar’s post about the conversion of AI and biotech and you’re really going like, yeah, I mean, not full in, but like very actively while I feel like what I see in biotech, I mean, people are starting to understand, okay, what is it about and starting to use it a bit, but at least let’s say even in European biotech, why, like, why are you guys so bullish on it?
So using it so much so early on it, like what’s like, yeah.
Lovisa Afzelius: I truly think that machine learning and AI is now in the place where you can revolutionize how we think about drug development. And I mean, my background is in computational chemistry. So really, I feel like back in the late 90s, scientists, no, we coded algorithms.
We use neural networks. We use quantum chemistry. We, I literally coded the algorithms to, to build those biological. I mean, the algorithms to describe biological scenarios. So we used all those different tools. And that’s when there was no infrastructure to do so. You had to partition your hard drive to get the Linux running.
There were no clusters. You had to build those clusters. It’s like you had to do everything yourself. And we also, I had to generate my own data to build my models and parameterize my algorithms. So it’s like Was not a time where you could have massive impact yet. Some of the softwares we developed are still in the market 20 years later.
So that’s good. But now I think with, if you think about some of the pre chain models, the GPTs of the worlds, you think about some of the reasoning layers that are starting to come out, strawberry one, et cetera. And then. I think now is the time where we can really start with subject matter expertise, build cognitive applications, and, and literally using the combination of our deep knowledge in biology and drug development and leverage the advances.
In machine learning and artificial intelligence, building knowledge graphs, using large language models to compile the totality of data, using molecular modeling to rapidly get to novel therapeutics. It’s, now is a time where I think we both have the data, we have the algorithm, we have the compute, we can bring it all together to, you I mean, drag development can easily be quite subjective.
You, you figure out this is what I want to do, and then you do everything to prove that you’re right. As opposed to being much more holistic using these tools and being able to reduce it down to from a almost like probabilistic perspective. perspective. If there is a solution, we should have the highest probability of actually finding it.
And I think that’s
Philip Hemme: what’s exciting. Also the blind spots when you’re on the subject of thinking.
Lovisa Afzelius: Exactly. Exactly. And I think that’s super exciting. I think that’s, that’s where we want to be. And then you have to make the investments to learn more about it and really try out it in multiple different settings so that you understand.
the powers and, you know, how to interact so that you get towards, I would say, augmented intelligence, where you get the best out of the human intelligence and the best out of the machine intelligence, and you bring it together into something that is so much better than each of the individual parts. Yeah, I like
Philip Hemme: that.
I like that a lot. Maybe if some of you have a question, I think there’s a mic somewhere here. Yeah, there. Don’t be shy. You had a question. No. Hi there. Perfect.
[00:26:31] What does success mean to Flagship Pioneering
Audience question: So I wanted to ask, you know, we talk a lot about, you know, returns. I think one question I have Luvisa is beyond returns, financial returns. What do you define? What is success to flagship with the startups you have and what do you think is, you know, a good return, a good success rate outside of returns.
Lovisa Afzelius: I mean, for me, what’s most important is that and for flagship, I would say is to make a stent, make a difference, make, you know, create a value to patients. I think that is where you truly generate returns. And you can do that in many different ways. Let me give you one example, which is for example, Altona, which is the tRNA company we created, which is about how can we create universal solutions to rare genetic diseases?
I mean, rare genetic diseases, ultra rare diseases has just been No one is really going there, or they’re going to very few specific diseases. And if we would actually develop drugs towards all of the 10, 000 different of diseases, it would take hundreds of years before we would get them through to marketed products.
So I think one example of what’s meaningful is where we say what if we could find universal solutions. to rare genetic diseases. What if we could pull together and bundle many different rare or ultra rare genetic diseases that share the same genetic mutation? Then we could use a single medicine to start treating thousands of different rare and ultra rare genetic diseases.
I think that’s a vision that is truly creating value for humanity because No one will otherwise be focusing on each of those different diseases. So that’s just one example of how the tRNA, which is a very unique modality, transfer RNA, which is literally, it’s a tRNA that reads the code on the mRNA to understand what amino acid to put on the growing polypeptide chain.
So it’s literally the physical link between the mRNA and the protein. So if there is no tRNA, it would just never be a protein. Protein. And then we came up with this, you know, you have a genetic code. If you do a single mutation, you go from coding for an amino acid to coding for a stop. We don’t have to think about at what gene it is or flanking regions.
Independent of what gene, you can use that same tRNA. Towards a, for example, premature stop codon to get towards that edited protein so that you restore the full length protein. And that’s then a solution that is unique in its ability to go after diseases that otherwise will be completely ignored.
So I think that’s just an example of what I, what’s value to me truly.
[00:29:20] How to help biotech spinoffs grow and advice for women on how to be a biotech leader
Audience question: So firstly, I thank you for the discussion. And well, I have two questions. The first one is so I come from an institute in Paris and we try to build startups with, you know, the knowledge developed by academia and by researchers.
So what is your opinion on those spin offs of from the academia? How can we help them grow? What would be your advice as a person who also helps, you know, building projects and bringing them? Further, that’s my first question. And then the second one is more not personal, but as a woman, how do you see being such as the head of such an, you know, an organization and what advices would you give to somebody, a woman, for example, a young woman, for example wanting to be in something like this.
So yeah, I have two questions. Yep.
Lovisa Afzelius: So let’s start with the one with regards to the startup in the academic settings and how to think about that. And I think that You know, what I would say is like, really try to surround yourselves with people that have done it before and have a lot of knowledge in the space and really trying to get as much as advice as ever possible, because it’s not going to be easy, right?
And you probably know that as, as well. And it takes a lot of tenacity to sort of push it forward and, and continue to Believe in it when sometimes it goes up and sometimes it go down. And, but it’s really by bringing the best people around you that I think that I think, and getting yourself into a environment where you have also access to capital and you really.
You work with people you want to work with because it’s, it’s a long journey from the very start to something. But let me spend a little bit more time on the diversity question because I think that that is a really important one. How can we bring diversity to every aspect of life, but also in the value creation or in the company creation setting and to the senior positions more generally.
And I think it’s, it’s you have for me, it’s a lot about now just not accept that it is in a certain way and it’s hard to recruit women or so. For one company like Altona, we, we just made a thing out of, we’re not going to have a recruitment firm that won’t bring a 50 50 when it comes to candidates.
And there were many we had to say no to because they said they couldn’t bring 50 50 when it comes to diversity. And it’s like, then you just have to say no, because that’s not good enough. If you put a little bit more effort into it, you will find, because there’s a ton of talent out there. The benefit then is that if you, when you start to bring in more diversity, you’re opening up massive talent pools and everyone.
They know someone else and they know someone else and that’s how you can then start to build those much more diverse systems. And it’s the same thing as with science. We say we want collaboration because we want different sort of mindsets. That’s how we drive innovation. And it’s the same when you’re driving a company because it’s just how people can bring different views to the table.
It’s the same mechanism. It just makes it better because everyone is more challenged. And then you have to find your right environments, and I would say Flagstaff’s always been super supportive in, you know, really trying to find as diverse and as, as environment as possible so that you get the best ideas out of it.
So it’s, it’s, it, you, we need to put work towards it. And then I think that’s when you can talk about return actually being, you know, very, very, very important. instrumental.
Philip Hemme: You think as a, as an individual, as a, as a young woman in biotech, a bit, if I hear what you’re saying is also like, go find supportive environment or supportive company or supportive people will support diversity.
Lovisa Afzelius: Yeah. And then pay it forward. So that, for example, now So when I recruit CEOs for my companies, I always keep diversity as one of my highest criteria because we also know that they probably needed to work harder than most others to get to the positions where they are. And that’s the kind of grit you also need to build and lead a company.
So I think it sort of just brings it all together.
Philip Hemme: I remember I saw the press release and I saw you were three women. Yes. The founding team. Yeah. Which is pretty. I think I’ve never seen that in the biotech.
Lovisa Afzelius: Then you’ll see more of that. That’s
Philip Hemme: good. Great question. Maybe one, one more question. It’s great.
You have so many questions. That’s, I think it’s, makes it more interactive.
[00:34:03] How to move from computational to translation sciences and bring drugs to market faster
Audience question: Hello. Very interesting to hear that you have a computational chemistry background. Just curious, what’s your opinion on the, some of the barriers or, blockers that are sort of preventing the translation of in silico modeling to wet lab execution and then into the clinic.
Lovisa Afzelius: So, so the question is how going from the computational to the translation sciences and actually bringing the medicines that we design all the way into the clinic and how we can make that faster, I assume is in part of that as well. I think that’s a great question. And so first of all, I think it’s a lot about creating less barriers between each of the different disciplines.
I think we’ve started to become good at designing molecules from the more computational chemistry perspective. And what we now need to, and it comes back a little bit to, to what we discussed before Subject matter expertise and cognitive applications to lie on top of some of these new tools that are there.
How can we start to simulate every step of that process from the actual target identification all the way through to basically the PK PD simulations and then creating frameworks that also regulatory agencies will start to become comfortable with. And I’ll give you an example, for example, in UpYourBio, which is in variant resilient vaccines, that is a lot about how do we design vaccines that elicit an antibody repertoire that is protective both today, but also to, towards future variants.
We built the Octavia and AI biology platform that allows us to identify what are the different mutations that, if they would occur. They would, we would not be protected towards them anymore. And then we design vaccines or antigens that allows us with those mutations that allows us then to elicit an antibody repertoire that is protected to end with the future.
But that comes with a challenge as to, you don’t know what’s actually going to happen. And how do you then early on build models and proof point them with real world data so that you can showcase that over, as we’ve done there, 18 months our vaccine was able to better protect towards emerging variants than standard of care.
And by constantly sort of building models and proving using real world data that it’s actually working. I think that’s how we can start to also create more of a confidence with the world that machine learning and model making is actually, and predictive design more generally, is something that will fast forward track development in a very effective way.
Philip Hemme: Good question. Maybe one more if someone has one.
[00:37:14] What can the EU learn from the US to create biotechs
Audience question: Hi, Louisa, Lene Geller from Women in Life Science, Denmark, and I can completely relate to what you say regarding diversity in top management on boards. But my question is a bit different. So what can How can we learn, what can we in Europe learn from the way that you in U. S. generate these viable biotech companies?
Of course, there’s much more capital available in the U. S., but the way that you, you know, you’re having great success with forming all these successful biotech companies and there’s capital there. There is a translational gap in, in Europe, you know, translating scientific innovations into medicines for patients.
So what are your, you know, top three things that we can learn from, from U. S. A.? It’s a
Lovisa Afzelius: very good question. And I think, I mean, going back to where we started with regards to collaboration, how do we bring the two ecosystems closer to each other? I think that’s one way of also sort of starting to establish an infrastructure or an ecosystem that allows us to tap into maybe capital from one side of the pond to innovation on the other side, et cetera, and bring that together.
Same thing with talent exchange, because I think that in the U S system that has been more of building your dream, building the companies and how can we, by also exchanging talent, bringing more of that also maybe to. other ecosystems around the world as well. And I think finally it’s a finding partners that truly have also capital available and showcasing good examples where additional capital actually creates better final solutions.
I think there is something about creating broader ecosystems from a capital race perspective, because capital will be important in order to bring these companies forward. And I think the best I can offer at that, because it’s a hard task in that many aspects, but I think it’s more about how we can actually collaborate and make it sort of a global scene as opposed to making it the European scene or the U.
S. scene or the Asia scene. And instead thinking about it, global problems needs global solutions. Let’s work on them together.
Philip Hemme: Great question. I think also like, as, as you said, I mean, crossing the ecosystem, I think as a European spending some time in Boston or in the, in the, in the valley, learning from what they, I mean, what, what the lessons were there.
And I think also, I remember on, on the show, we had Otello from Omega and he was, he has a European background as well. You were saying every time you invest in a European company, one of the requirements is the CEO needs to spend time in Boston very early on and have a presence, I think.
Lovisa Afzelius: Yeah. No, I mean, it’s like being around those have already done it.
I mean, I think that is another piece to it as well, because then it just makes it easier to see okay, they were able to have overcome that. If they could do it, then I can do that too. Right. Yeah.
[00:40:36] How do you bridge the gap between the amount of biotech company creation in the US vs the EU
Philip Hemme: And actually I had a question on, on LinkedIn. There was a question similar to, to, to, to your question as well to the last question was how do you.
bridge the gap between company creation or the amount of company creation in the US versus Europe?
Lovisa Afzelius: Yeah. It’s a big question. And I think it comes back to what we talked about. How do we bring them together? How do we bring, how do we make it easier to exchange ideas, capital, talent, and finding places where we can unite around certain types of science that we’re all passionate about.
And, and use that to the,
Philip Hemme: and I guess there’s things that are beyond biotech. I mean, the U S for, for when I was studying and learn a lot from that, it’s just so entrepreneurial culture, which is deep from hundreds of years ago, which is much stronger than let’s say in Europe where. Yeah. Yeah. We had some entrepreneurs and we still have, and it’s growing actually pretty fast, but there’s a, there’s a delta.
Lovisa Afzelius: Yes. And I think that the, also the universities, they are good in actually teaching entrepreneurship and they are good in actually sort of bringing the different, the competences together into an ecosystem. When I did the MBA over at MIT, we had a lot of. Just entrepreneurship. How do you interact with the ecosystem?
How do you build bridges? How do you bring things together? How do you create your own startup? That was part of the curriculum. And I think that also helps and bringing people from the outside. That’s how I met Nubar Afeyan for the first time, our founder of Flagship, because he came and talked about entrepreneurship and how he had sort of built that process at Flagship.
And that’s actually what made me leave. The 85, 000 people, big pharma to go to four people, small biotech and, and try that out because it was just exciting to hear someone who’s thought so deeply about how to actually create companies in a way that I had not heard before articulate. It
Philip Hemme: makes me laugh because I remember when I was in Boston, I, I chose to not do a PhD and then I met so many PhDs who were like, so entrepreneurial and they were like, take a one, two year break to try to start up, go back to the PhD.
And I was like, it’s like, it
Lovisa Afzelius: is a good, it’s a very good growing ground for, for that. It’s so many different startups around there,
Philip Hemme: which makes it, yeah, Kendall Square, I think for anyone in the room, if you haven’t visited, I think it’s, yeah, it’s worth, it’s worth the trip. Maybe just Switching a bit topic to what your personal journey, as I said, I wanted to cover this as well.
[00:43:07] Lessons from Lovisa Afzelius for an early-stage biotech career
Philip Hemme: I mean, we, we, we mentioned it here and there you, I mean, you grew up in Sweden, you studied here, master’s PhD, you started your career here. And then you moved to the U. S. Yeah. Can you talk a bit on, yeah, some, some of your lessons there in the, in the earlier stage of your, of your career?
Lovisa Afzelius: Yeah, I mean, I started off doing what was an industrial PhD and looking back, it was actually quite innovative and very forward thinking in how can we use the silico methodologies to actually bridge between.
biology and chemistry. And this is like late 1990s. It’s like five years after we probably sent our first emails. That’s how we, you know, we said that we’re actually going to do this conversationally. And I think that is already from the very beginning being in an environment with a lot of support and a lot of very talented people, as well as coming back to the question on equality.
I mean, every, it is a very diverse, it was a. It was a, as men, it was a female as male. Role models that I had throughout many of these first years, which I think is, is a great foundation for then always wanting to build diverse teams, but also a lot of teamwork, which I mean, innovation is a team sport.
I think that’s how we call it. a flagship because it’s really you need everyone to chime in in order to make it constantly better and and that’s I would say the Swedish upbringing was very strong on it’s all a team sport and I think that’s one of those what’s the word
Philip Hemme: again the collective of individual that you have a swedish word for that yeah the concept the
Lovisa Afzelius: the Well, we like the log on word, but it’s, that’s not what you’re thinking about.
No, I can’t think of the word that you’re thinking about right now, but it’s definitely that you bring it all together. I’m looking at some sweets here to get some help, but what, how we bring it all together and, and sort of that team spirit and consensus is one. I think that’s the consensus word, which is very strong sort of also in the Swedish.
And it doesn’t mean that you don’t challenge each other. It’s more about that you listen to all the different opinions around the table and then you sort of bring that next
Philip Hemme: Nice. And and you spent, as you said, you spent quite some time in big pharma USCA at Pfizer. And then how, how was that transition out of big pharma to,
Lovisa Afzelius: to the small biotech, biotech, 85,000 to the four
It was quite different, I would say. I mean. What you do learn is that you have to, and that I think is something that I learned also during my PhD and all of that, you need to be able to. Tap in and, and contribute to many, many different areas. In big pharma, you easily get quite sort of, this is my area of expertise.
This is where I primarily are contributing. Going into the, for people, it’s like, if you don’t do it yourself, no one else is going to do it either. So it’s like, it’s more about really sort of digging into each of the different problems and also be very focused on what you choose to put your time on, because.
There are so many, you need to know in drug development, the difference, yeah, you need to know all the different things you could do. And that’s why 15 years in big pharma was a very good training for how you need to do drug development. But you can’t do everything in the small startup, but you need to think very, very, very cognizantly about what are the few things that are really, that really matters and that you should put A lot of effort making it as good as ever, ever possible.
And there will be other things that are not as critical to get you from A to C that you may have to take a lighter touch at because you’re only four people. But also you can compliment them afterwards. So it’s much, I would say it’s a, it takes a lot of strategic thinking as to what really matters when and be very sort of efficient with the resources.
So.
[00:47:18] How to attract the best biotech talent
Philip Hemme: I like that. That’s actually one a bit segway, but one topic I wanted to, to touch base on was I think a flagship, you’re also especially good from a talent perspective to attract some top, top level, top executives, some farmer, bring them in as entrepreneur residents or venture partner. And then they’re running some companies.
Can you talk about that? I guess it’s similar.
Lovisa Afzelius: That has made Flagship such a more mature organization as well because I think in, in we are making medicines to patients and you need to have a strong expertise and you need to sort of connect that platform knowledge, platform building. with the drug development process to similarly set the compasses right from the first place.
Where do you have the greatest unmet need? What are the target product profiles you actually want to go after? And then by working together with those that have done it over and over and over across modalities, across disease areas, across companies, across all those different interfaces and work very, very closely with them to triage down.
Where should you focus a particular platform towards? What are the different value pools that you should unlock with that platform? Because that’s where that platform will bring the greatest value.
[00:48:38] Moving to Boston
Philip Hemme: I like that. I would have one more question and then I would open up again if, if some of you have more questions.
One thing I think that we talked about, you mentioned your MBA at, at MIT, how, how did you come to the decision to, to move to Boston actually and like, I think it must be a difficult decision.
Lovisa Afzelius: Yeah. So sometimes it’s these, you know, when things happen that you hadn’t planned for, then it can be a pretty good decision driver.
So I was working with AstraZeneca in Södertälje and, and the site closed down. And I couldn’t have the possibility to continue maybe at AstraZeneca in, in Möndal, where I had So, like, we didn’t have photovoltaic. Exactly. Oh, okay. So, then that gave me a chance to sort of reflect over what I wanted to do next.
If I wanted to continue what I was doing, I started off as CEO for a small biotech in Sweden, in the Karolinska development environment. And then I got recruited to, to Pfizer in the U S and it was just one of those, it was an opportunity, had a very young family and we’re like, okay, let’s give it a try.
Let’s see. Let’s, let’s do it. And if that wouldn’t have happened before, I would probably, you know, very likely, maybe I would still be in Sweden and still working with the same company. Because it wasn’t so that I’ve always enjoyed each of those different phases that I’ve been in. So it’s never, so it’s just the desire to actually do something different that drives you to take on this and not being afraid of trying.
Something new. And I think that goes along all the different things that we do, just not being afraid of trying.
Philip Hemme: Yeah. And open to
Lovisa Afzelius: opportunities. Open to opportunities. Just know that, you know, you won’t be best at it from the very beginning, but you can truly learn it if you, if you want to.
Philip Hemme: And can you talk about the MBA a bit?
Like, why the decision to make an MBA? I think you made it while you were at Pfizer.
Audience question: I did.
Philip Hemme: And I think it’s also doing MBA in the U. S. as a European is a quite good way of learning, of being exposed to the ecosystem, as you said, meeting great people at Nubar who lecture at MIT.
Lovisa Afzelius: So actually, the decision to make, to take an MBA came actually when I was CEO of a small biotech in Sweden, because that’s when I realized that I come from a complete sort of scientific background.
You’re welcome. PhD, master of science, it was all sort of drug development. It was, and now here I was as a CEO, I needed to take many other decisions that were much more strategic, much more business oriented than when you’re a pure scientist and such. And when I then joined Pfizer, I asked if I could just continue to do that development while there.
And I think it, it, it did open up a lot new perspectives because first of all, you learned the theory behind how you think about value creation and value capture, which are both very important aspects of company creation, right? Being able to do that in a innovation system such as MIT really is just gave me exposure much more to that external biotech world.
And I’ve always been interested in the totality. I like the systems thinking about company, company creation. So it was a natural step in that. Okay.
Philip Hemme: Nice. Nice. We’ll open up for, I think, one or two more questions.
[00:52:13] Quickfire
Philip Hemme: All right. Then I have some, so then I’ll finish with some, some quick questions or quick fire. Wow. Just a yes, no, or one sentence, one sentence answer. What’s on the top of your mind at the moment?
Lovisa Afzelius: What’s going to be the next big innovation in biotech? I think that’s something I can always think about. And it’s good when you’re traveling, because it gives you time. That was not the one sentence, but it does, it’s a new type of thing. Yes.
Philip Hemme: What’s your favorite biotech book?
Lovisa Afzelius: My favorite biotech book, you know what I like, which is not a biotech book Born to Run, which is not about biotech at all, but it’s about how, born to run, how just by you find yourself, you grow up in a certain environment, just make something natural. And I think that’s a lot around also company creation, find yourself in the right environment, because if you can do so, then you automatically just don’t see the barriers, but you see that it’s a natural thing to do.
Philip Hemme: What’s your favorite biotech hub in Europe?
Lovisa Afzelius: In Europe? I’m born in Gothenburg, so I think I have to, I should say Gothenburg.
Philip Hemme: Even with the AstraZeneca, so a site who closed?
Lovisa Afzelius: Absolutely. It was a fantastic time of my life.
Philip Hemme: What mistake you made over the past 12 months?
Lovisa Afzelius: Over the past 12 months, probably very many very many.
It’s a tough one. I probably should have spent more time thinking on big problems and oftentimes it’s easy to get, you know operational because you have to do it, but you have to sort of manage your time. So that you always save time for thinking. Save
Philip Hemme: time for thinking. I like that.
Lovisa Afzelius: Save time for
Philip Hemme: thinking.
Your favorite European biotech?
Lovisa Afzelius: European biotech? Yeah.
Philip Hemme: Or one of the one that struck
Lovisa Afzelius: you? One of the, well, I’ll say, as we discussed before, bioarctic, because it’s a lot of my own colleagues that are working there and I think they’ve done a really good job.
Philip Hemme: Nice. We recorded the episode yesterday with, with Gunilla, so we’ll come out as well.
How much do you sleep the night? Six hours. Wow.
Lovisa Afzelius: But I do it every night. Yeah. I try to be very sort of stringent on that.
Philip Hemme: What’s the most impressive drug on the markets at the moment?
Lovisa Afzelius: I think that the vaccines during COVID were impressive drugs under what circumstances they were developed and leveraging a completely new technology to meet an unprecedented, unmet need.
I think that’s impressive. Yeah. At the crazy speed. At the crazy speed, at the crazy speed, under crazy circumstances. Yeah.
Philip Hemme: Awesome. And last question one of your biotech heroes, if possible, a European.
Lovisa Afzelius: Possible European. I mean, I would say, I think Neuborough Fain, who is the founder of, of Flagship, he’s been at this for 25 years and it’s very inspirational to work in such an environment because you always learn something.
I think there are a lot of fantastic founders and, and entrepreneurs in Europe as well. It’s harder for me to choose a single one, but I have a lot of role models in Europe Nice, nice.
[00:55:41] Thanks for listening
Philip Hemme: Great. Thanks a lot for the conversation, Larissa. Please, take a round of applause for her.
I really enjoyed this experiment on stage, and we’ll be curious to hear what you think. So please leave me a comment below, or anywhere you are, or shoot me an email at
I’m impressed by how good Flagship is at company building. I’m also impressed by Lovisa’s clarity on machine learning and AI, as well as her Swedish humility combined with a Bostonian drive and ambition. If you’ve also enjoyed this episode, please hit the like, follow, subscribe. review button. Any of these actions would help a lot to give more people access to the show.
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