Nele Van Dessel shared her inspiring journey from bioengineer to entrepreneur, detailing how she overcame visa issues and limited connections within the Boston venture capital network to ultimately secure non-dilutive funding as an immigrant founder.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Nele Van Dessel: Yes, so I’m Nele Van Dessel. I am a bioengineer by training. And I did both my undergrad and my PhD in Belgium. That’s where I came across my first problem. I worked on a protein that was a nuclear scaffold protein.
But I also looked at bacterial cancer targeting and at that point, there were eight labs in the world focusing on that, and I found Neil Forbes’ lab at UMass Amherst. So I applied to his lab, and we made a bacterial delivery system for delivering drugs to solid tumors. Once we raised money from government funding, SBIRs, he could no longer be the CEO according to his Conflict of Interest Statement. So for I think the next year and a half, we were CEO-less and I was a CSO, but basically doing everything a CEO does. I think in 2018, we just flipped it. We said, Okay, I’m becoming CEO, basically putting the title on what I was already doing. That’s how I started running the company. I always call myself The Reluctant CEO because my goal was to translate the technology, not proceed to run the company.
I think in total now we’ve raised $2 million in non-dilutive funding from SBIR grants and other local grants. I think the biggest difference in writing was really gaining the business perspective. Before that, we were very scientifically focused, and writing SBIR is very generally focused, such as the safety of what we were doing.
As a postdoc in Western Mass originally coming from Belgium, I was not very connected to the Boston VC network, and getting access to that was really hard. So looking into getting the amount of funding we needed for what was a very high-risk project. At that point, we immediately went to “let’s just start writing grants”. That was something we were good at. So we started the LLC in 2016 because you need to have the LLC in place to start writing grants. It took us three tries to get our first SBIR. And then we got lucky, we both got one from the NSF and the NIH at the same time. So in 2018, when those both came in, we could start running and get done. We also had some visa issues that had to be sorted out before I could start working on the grants. So it was a bit difficult and for all immigrant founders that need solutions for that please come find me.
At Ernest Pharmaceuticals, we are engineering bacteria to treat solid tumors. We have created an attenuated salmonella strain that we inject into the body, it courses throughout your whole body. In the healthy tissue, it gets cleared, while in the tumors it can grow. The same mechanisms that allow solid tumors to grow in your body are what allow bacteria to grow in those tumors, which means that they can target every tumor out there independent of the origin or the genetic profile of that tumor. We’ve also combined this with several cytotoxic compliance that will kill the cancers. We currently have a lead candidate to lead our first lead programming and hope to be in the clinic with that candidate by 2027.
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