A Practical lens for Board Members - Will this PI Founder still be CEO by Series B? Most European life sciences funds back companies where the founding CEO is a first‑time scientific leader: a PI out of a top lab, an ex‑pharma director, sometimes a computational founder with limited management experience. Very few investment memos say, “And we expect to replace them before Series B.” Yet that’s exactly what happens in a lot of cases—not always for the wrong reasons, but often

Your first five hires will decide whether your “platform biotech” ever becomes more than a pitch deck. In the first 18 months you’re not building an org chart, you’re building an engine: one person who truly owns the platform, one who runs everything that isn’t science, one who turns data into a scalable system, an early regulatory voice to stop you tripping over yourself later, and a business partner who keeps capital and deals flowing.

Choosing where to set up in Europe is just the beginning. The real challenge — and the real competitive advantage — lies in finding, attracting, and retaining the right people in markets where the best talent has choices

For generations, treating cancer has relied on a pretty brutal calculus: hit the body hard and hope the cancer dies first. Traditional chemotherapy is essentially a scorched-earth strategy. It works, but at a massive cost—wrecking the heart, gut, and nervous system along with the tumour. . For decades, researchers have chased a deceptively simple question: What if we could send the drug only where it’s actually needed? Antibody-drug conjugates, or ADCs, are the most promising