Taking the fight against liver diseases to the next level

Vincent, you surprised us with a press release: GENFIT acquires Swiss biotech Versantis. Congratulations from ETH Zürich for this great achievement. How does it feel?

My team and I are very proud and at the same time overwhelmed. It needs both luck and perseverance to get where we are. As is often the case in biotech, it felt like we were walking a thin line between failure and success, and now the resilience of our team paid out.

What happens now?

Versantis becomes part of GENFIT: our research, the underlying intellectual property assets, and our team. It’s an excellent fit. Our liver drugs complement GENFIT’s pipeline and our expertise in advanced liver diseases, such as Acute-on-Chronic Liver Failure, bolsters their scientific and medical troops. GENFIT on the other hand provides decades of experience in chronic liver conditions and solid managerial and clinical development teams. Together we have an ideal environment and key resources to push the development of life-saving drugs forward.

Can you take us back to the beginning of the Versantis story?

The idea was born when I applied for my first patent. At the time I was a PhD student in the group of Prof. Leroux. We invented a dialysis method for the treatment of ammonia and drug intoxication. Soon afterwards I won a Pioneer Fellowship from ETH Zürich. This incubator programme provided me with the means to carry out the proof-of-concept, develop a business plan and prioritise the most relevant applications and market spaces.

You have identified liver diseases as your main target. How can Versantis help fighting the disease?

Applying our method to liver diseases will hopefully contribute to an urgently needed improvement in patents’ lives. Despite the liver playing a central role in a myriad of vital functions, liver disease has been neglected to the point that it is now one of the fastest-growing cause of death. Every fourth person today is affected by chronic liver disease, many of them undiagnosed.

A sick liver can no longer eliminate the multiple toxins and wastes our body produces, which triggers a whole cascade of health issues leading to multiple organ failure and Acute-on-Chronic Liver Failure, a severe condition associated with up to 75% mortality within a month. Getting swiftly rid of the toxins will stop that cascade, allow the body time to activate its own healing process, and reverse the fatal course of the acute event. Our method is based on injecting the drug into the patient’s abdomen where it captures and traps the toxins. It can then be removed from the abdomen with the excess toxins. Thus, the drug achieves its action without relying on the liver- or kidney metabolic pathway which is defective in these patients.

Will we still see you in Zurich’s start-up ecosystem?

I have received a lot of valuable support during the early steps of my career. I would be happy to give some of this support back to the next generation of entrepreneurs – as a coach or mentor. Therefore, yes, I will be around.