InterAx: The Venture Leader Biotech advancing drug discovery programs

05.09.2022 07:30, Tracy Woodley

This fall, the Venture Leaders Biotech will represent Swiss innovation in the United States. To select the 10 featured startups, a jury of professional investors and medtech experts reviewed 90 applications. These startups improve diagnostics, treatments, and well-being with innovative solutions that cover artificial intelligence, sensors, smart devices, and robotics. Allow us to introduce you to each of the Venture Leaders Biotech 2022 ahead of the September 2022 roadshow in Boston and Cambridge: Meet Aurélien Rizk, the CEO of InterAx.

Name: Aurélien Rizk
Location: Switzerland
Nationality: French
Graduated from: INRIA, Paris-Rocquencourt, PhD, 2011
Job title: CEO
Number of employees: 11
Money raised: CHF 5 million
First touchpoint with Venturelab: Venture Kick program in 2016


Explain in one or two short sentences what your startup does and why: InterAx developed a method to accelerate and de-risk the discovery of novel therapies. We do that by creating drug candidates that induce a clearly defined effect on the complex cellular response, thus leading to higher therapeutic efficacy and safety.

How and where did you come up with the idea for your startup?
I worked during my Ph.D. and Postdoc, eight years in academia in total, on developing new methods based on mathematical modeling and numerical simulations to better understand the complexity of the cell response. I wanted to confront these methods to reality, apply them to drug discovery programs, and have an impact in the field. This is why I co-founded InterAx Biotech in 2016 and why the focus of the company is to advance drug discovery programs, internally and with partners.

What do you expect from the Venture Leaders roadshow, and how will it help you achieve your vision?
Although I already participated in the Venture Leaders roadshow in China I think that learning how to best present complex technology is an ever-going process. The intense program of the Venture Leaders roadshow is an excellent opportunity. In addition, the program gives a big visibility boost and opens new opportunities for meeting new investors and partners. We plan to significantly expand the InterAx drug discovery pipeline to leverage our uniqueness in the field. New investors and partners in the Boston area will support InterAx in that goal.

Who does your product or solution help, and how?
Our technology characterizes the cell response triggered by drugs with unprecedented detail. This allows us to create drugs activating the cell responses linked with therapeutic efficacy and avoiding those linked with side effects, thus significantly de-risking clinical trials.

Our mathematical modeling approach acts as a bridge between, on one side, the world of experimental science which is very rich but unstructured, and on the other side, the world of artificial intelligence which requires lots of high-quality well-formatted data. We get the best of both worlds. Our combination of mathematical modeling and AI is unique and this is what makes us the first to be able to apply AI methods to predict and optimize cell responses.

What are you most excited about at work right now?
The most exciting aspect of our work is currently the planning of additional internal drug discovery programs for neurological diseases and metabolic diseases, besides our current program in cancer. We created InterAx to have an impact on diseases with unmet needs internally and with partners. Applying our platform to these new programs is a significant step in the accomplishment of our initial goal.

How did you build your team?
Our technology platform requires many different skills: AI, pharmacology, math modeling, cell assays, drug discovery, and computational chemistry. In addition, its successful commercialization requires expertise in management, business development, and good pharma and biotech networks. We assembled the team to cover all these aspects, always looking for people who want to go beyond the current state of the art of drug discovery methods.

Which market are you addressing and what is the potential of your startup?
We collaborate with pharma and biotech companies on drug discovery programs. We also build our own pipeline of drug assets with our platform that we then out-license or co-develop with pharma partners. Our platform is not limited to a specific indication, it is applicable to many diseases with unmet needs, such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer, neurological diseases, and metabolic diseases. This is a market of several hundred billion USD per year.

We also see high opportunities in combining our platform with complementary AI technologies for drug discovery and development. We see the biggest potential of AI not in speed, but in creating drugs that would not have been possible to find with more traditional methods.

What are your key achievements to date?
Collaborations with big pharma companies have been the first significant achievements, validating our technology. We have also been very successful with non-dilutive funding. We obtained more than CHF 5M from Swiss and European grants, doubling what we raised in equity, thanks to the uniqueness and high potential of our technology.

Our latest achievement is the successful discovery of novel drug candidates targeting a novel mode of action against solid tumors. Initial promising results in vitro show that our drug candidates block proliferation and migration of breast cancer cells, and also block in mice the receptor target function – thus promising to inhibit tumor growth and metastasis.
 
What is one thing not many people know about you?
I created another company before InterAx called Algorizk. It develops educational apps for smartphones and tablets using real-time physics simulations and attracted more than a million users.  A computer simulation is a powerful tool to understand complex dynamic systems. This is true for physics simulations as I did with Algorizk and it is also true with the simulation of cellular biology as we do at InterAx.

What is your favorite podcast and why?
StarTalk by Neil de Grasse Tyson as it combines science and entertainment.

Who inspires you and why? 
Prof. Gebhard Schertler, also co-founder of InterAx. He is always thinking ahead to predict which methods will be the most important in the future. He also always deeply cares about the people working with him.

What is the most challenging aspect of being a founder?
The fact that founders have to cover many different tasks from fundraising, technology development, and team management. 

What is the most rewarding aspect of being a founder?
Developing new technology and a new product is very hard and unpredictable but also very rewarding when successful and finally making a difference.

The Venture Leaders Biotech program is co-organized by Venturelab and Swissnex Boston and supported by Debiopharm, EPFL Lausanne, ETH Zurich, EY - Ernst & Young, Swiss Biotech Association, VISCHER, Hansjörg Wyss, and Venture Leaders alum Ulf Grawunder.