Venture Leaders Life Sciences – Meet Anne Schmidt of Elthera
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In two days, Anne Schmidt of Elthera will travel to Boston with Venture Leaders Life Sciences to discover the local Life Sciences industry and meet key investors. Read about her motivation for applying to the program.
Can you introduce yourself and your project briefly?Founded in 2016, Elthera is a biotech startup developing a first-in-class antibody therapy against the novel target L1CAM for the treatment of several highly malignant tumor types. After securing the first seed financing round in summer 2017, we started our development activities. We selected the lead antibody for further development by Q1/2018 from a panel of anti-L1CAM antibodies that we licensed from the German Cancer Research Center. The selection of the lead candidate was the first important milestone for the company.
I’m Anne, the CEO of Elthera. Having worked nearly 20 years in small biotech and big pharma companies, it was time for me to do something new. Therefore, I founded Elthera together with Jacques Gaudreault and Gunther Spohn, two colleagues from ESBATech.
Why did you choose Boston as your business development destination?
Boston is one of the biotech hubs in the US with many pharma / biotech companies and also Venture Capital firms. Therefore, it represents an excellent destination for business development and fundraising activities.
What do you hope to achieve from this trip?
Generally, I hope to get exposure to the American biotech community and expand my network with US contacts. More specifically, I hope to get access to American VCs actively investing in biotech companies and connect with big biotech / pharma companies potentially interested in partnering up with Elthera and / or to get early attention in preparation of a future exit.
Why is the Venture Leaders Life Sciences experience beneficial for your company?
The boot camp week of Venture Leaders Life Sciences will give us the chance to get access to VC companies and big biotech / pharma companies, which is hard for a company based outside of the US without being introduced. Therefore, I firmly believe, that this week will be very beneficial for our company. Besides the contacts, being part of the Venture Leaders is a reward, it helps promote Elthera as a promising company in Switzerland that has already created very positive feedback from our investor / shareholder community.
What is pushing you towards international expansion?
For the development of our clinical candidate towards clinical testing, Elthera will need substantial funding of approx. CHF 40 Mio by Q1 2019. It will be hard to raise only from a Swiss investor base. Therefore, Elthera is planning to go international for the upcoming Series A financing round.
What do you foresee as the largest hurdles towards expansion into the Boston area?
The biggest challenge will be to identify and get access to the right, i.e. interested investors in the Boston area and generate interest to invest in Elthera.
What makes you most nervous or excited about the trip?
I am excited about going to Boston with a group of fellow Life Sciences entrepreneurs who share similar experiences and challenges as I have as a CEO of a startup. I hope to have the possibility to exchange and learn from the experience of others (and of course also to have fun doing this together).
Follow the Venture Leaders Life Sciences roadshow on Twitter and Facebook using the hashtag #vleadearsLifeScience.
Venture Leaders Life Sciences is co-organized by Venturelab and swissnex Boston, and supported by Kellerhals Carrard, digitalswitzerland, Canton de Vaud, Canton of Zurich, Wyss Foundation, EY entreprenenur of the year, EPF Lausanne, ETH Zurich, Paul Scherrer Institut and University of Zurich.
