From researcher to entrepreneur
Villigen, 08.11.2017 - With the new Founder Fellowship, the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI gives young researchers the chance to become entrepreneurs. Within 18 months they have to demonstrate the commercialisation potential of their business ideas and draw up an initial business plan. Today the official ceremony awarding this grant took place: The first three prize winners are working on a new pharmaceutical technology, a nano-energy technology, and a neutron detector. UBS supports this initiative with a contribution to the grants.
Because the road from a promising research result to an innovative and commercially viable product is long and rocky, many good ideas die in an early dry stretch. That is why the Paul Scherrer Institute has brought a new funding instrument into being with the Founder Fellowship, an 18-month grant that supports young researchers and engineers of PSI on the entrepreneurial career path, financially as well as with coaching and counselling. "We want to promote entrepreneurship and an entrepreneurial culture at PSI", explains John Millard of the Technology Transfer office. "With the Founder Fellowship, we can embolden talented researchers at PSI to pursue their promising business ideas and found a spin-off."
The Founder Fellowship is endowed with 150,000 Swiss francs per person, which the winner can use for salary, material, or other costs. During the 18 months, the Fellows are given full access to the PSI research facilities. After that, though, they have to leave the Paul Scherrer Institute. "We want to draw a clear line", John Millard says. "In fact, there doesn't have to be either a finished product or a prototype after the Fellowship has run its course; but it must be clear whether or not the technology can be commercialised." As a next step, the researchers would then devote themselves to the search for investors and found a spin-off.
In January, PSI called on its researchers to apply for a Founder Fellowship. During the summer an external expert panel selected, out of the business ideas submitted for the first round of the Founder Fellowship, three winners who were given their Fellowship certificates at a ceremony today.
Convinced of the usefulness of this measure, UBS contributed to the grants. UBS Regional Director Aargau/Solothurn Thomas Sommerhalder explains: "It is already impressive to see what intellectually promising high-tech business ideas are being developed here at PSI. For us it is a central concern to support the development of start-ups in our region, in order to strengthen the business and innovation power of the canton in a sustainable way."
In the new year another round of competition for the Founder Fellowship will be announced. "Our goal is to firmly establish the Founder Fellowship as a funding instrument for budding entrepreneurs at PSI", explains John Millard.
Text: Joel Bedetti
Contact
John Paul Millard
Technology Transfer
Paul Scherrer Institute, 5232 Villigen PSI, Switzerland
Telephone: +41 56 310 41 83, e-mail: john.millard@psi.ch
The three winners of a PSI Founder Fellowship and their projects:
A new bio-robot
With a new method for modifying antibodies, Philipp Spycher wants to develop drugs that are more stable and, thus, have fewer side-effects.
Isaac Newton is said to have had his "Eureka!" moment when an apple fell on his head. Philipp Spycher had the idea that inspired him in a Key West hotel room in August 2015, when he couldn't sleep and needed to get moving. At the time Spycher, a postdoctoral radiopharmaceutical researcher at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, was concerned with the question of how active agents could be bound to antibodies more efficiently. That's because, in combination with an antibody, the active agent can target the diseased cells in the body and, thus, can take effect in the right place. With the conventional method, the active agent is chemically attached to the antibody. This process creates a mixture of different compounds, each of which binds the active ingredient to the antibody at a different site. The mixture is difficult to analyse and can cause serious side-effects. Spycher hit on the idea of pursuing another approach in which, by means of enzymes, the active ingredient can be tacked onto the antibody directly at the optimal site, precisely and without great effort. As a result, these so-called antibody-agent conjugates can be produced more rapidly and at lower cost. Also, drugs made in this way should be better tolerated and more effective.
As a child Philipp Spycher, 34, already had the urge to explore. As a teenager, he read popular science magazines such as Bild der Wissenschaft and Spektrum der Wissenschaft. From this he learned about the revolution that was taking place in life sciences: nanotechnology promised to harness nature with a precision never known before. Spycher was especially fascinated by one idea: nano-robots that destroy cancer cells. "Cancer is an issue in our family", Spycher says. His grandmother and an uncle died from it. After graduation, he studied nanosciences in Basel and biomedical technology at ETH Zurich. In his doctoral research he investigated how molecules could be modified for cell studies with enzymes and, to further this research, he took a postdoctoral job at the Center for Radiopharmaceutical Sciences at PSI. "Without the first class infrastructure, the supportive environment of my group and the great freedom, I would never have been able to realise my idea in this way", Spycher says. In spring 2017, he tested the idea that he had that night in Key West and discovered, surprisingly, that his approach works for all known antibodies and a large number of active agents.
In June, he successfully presented his idea to the jury of the PSI Founder Fellowship. In the coming 18 months he must produce the "proof-of-concept": evidence that his idea, which has been tested in the artificial environment of the laboratory, also shows the desired effect under realistic conditions. Since Spycher is confident in his new method, he intends to found a start-up company before long. For pharmaceutical companies, the start-up will better and more efficiently bind active ingredients to antibodies, but it will also develop its own drugs. "Somehow, I have built a nano-robot after all", Philipp Spycher says. "It's not, however, like any robot I would have imagined when I was 14, but rather a kind of bio-robot that can fight cancer."
Text: Joel Bedetti
Contact
Dr Philipp Spycher
Goup Pharmacology
Paul Scherrer Institute, 5232 Villigen PSI, Switzerland
Telephone: +41 56 310 45 98, e-mail: philipp.spycher@psi.ch
More than a prototype
Jean-Baptiste Mosset wants to commercialise a neutron detector to spot plutonium and uranium.
After completing physics studies at EPFL in Lausanne, Jean-Baptiste Mosset wanted to become a physics teacher. But during his year of senior-class teacher training, it became clear to the then-25-year-old that he didn't want to spend his working life in a classroom. Jean-Baptiste Mosset became a researcher. Today, 15 years later, he stands again at a critical juncture. He is venturing into the role of an entrepreneur. "For my whole scientific career, I have been building prototypes", Mosset says. "Now I want to develop a product that will be mass-produced."
The first prototype was a positron-emission tomography (PET) scanner used in biology and pharmacology, for example, to follow the movement of antibodies in laboratory mice. Mosset developed a gamma-ray detector for the system, as part of his doctoral project. Then, he took up a postdoctoral position at EPFL where, as part of a research group, he built an electromagnetic calorimeter that was supposed to measure the energy distribution of cosmic rays while suspended from a research balloon. Before the prototype was finished, however, the project was cancelled. Mosset found a job in the Laboratory for Particle Physics at PSI. "I was very lucky", he says. "It was the perfect position for me." The laboratory developed a neutron detector that could be used, for example, to detect neutrons in studies of materials at PSI's neutron source SINQ. What's special about this detector: It is designed to detect neutrons without helium-3, the expensive gas used in neutron detectors up to now. Mosset and his research colleagues replaced helium-3 with a less expensive technology, based on zinc sulfide phosphor with lithium-6Li fluoride and optical fibres, and obtained equally good performance.
In January 2016, Jean-Baptiste Mosset talked about his new method with a PSI colleague who works in the Nuclear Energy and Safety Research Division, which among other things analyses the fuel rods of the Swiss nuclear power plants. The colleague asked Mosset if this method could also be used to detect fast neutrons as they are produced in radioactive materials. Mosset built a small prototype, which he successfully modified for this purpose. The only question: Where, other than scientific institutes, is there a market for such a device? Mosset looked into this and found out that in the years since 9/11, 12,000 neutron detectors were installed in shipping ports, border crossings, and airports worldwide to prevent terror attacks with plutonium. With Jean-Baptiste Mosset's new technology, less expensive and more efficient neutron detectors could be developed. In the next 18 months, Mosset wants to further develop his prototype and find out if demand for this technology exists in industry.
Text: Joel Bedetti
Contact
Dr. Jean-Baptiste Mosset
Goup Material Science and Simulation
Paul Scherrer Institute, 5232 Villigen PSI, Switzerland
Telephone: +41 56 310 36 25, e-mail: jean-baptiste.mosset@psi.ch
Power from nanomagnets
Oles Sendetskyi wants to use polarity reversal in nanomagnets to develop a sustainable power source for small devices
Ukrainian Oles Sendetskyi deals with magnets so tiny that they amount to just one-thousandth of the width of a human hair. Yet the 27-year-old's ambitions are anything but tiny. "Today many processes for sustainable production of electric power are inefficient or too expensive", says Sendetskyi, "and I want to help to change that." The winner of the Founder Fellowship of the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI wants to lay the foundation for power production using nanomagnets.
Oles Sendetskyi received his bachelor's degree in physics in Kiev, and he completed his master's degree within the framework of the EU's Erasmus Mundus Programme for students from outside Europe in Rennes, Munich, Grenoble - and Villigen, where he was a trainee in the Laboratory for Neutron Scattering. After this, for his doctoral work, he returned to PSI, which had impressed him with its many large-scale research facilities. Sendetskyi investigated the behaviour of nanometre-scale magnets that spontaneously reverse polarity - that is, their magnetic direction. He asked himself if this effect, which has impeded the further miniaturisation of hard drives, might not also be used positively to produce electric power. After a few inquiries he realised that no one had thought of this before. "As a student I had the feeling that it would be nearly impossible to discover something new myself", says Oles Sendetskyi. "But there will always be things that the others haven't imagined."
In January Oles Sendetskyi attended the information session on the Founder Fellowship, where Christian Brönnimann, CEO of Dectris - a PSI spin-off that has been developing X-ray cameras since 2006 - told about the founding of his company. The Dectris success story strengthened Oles Sendetskyi's own resolve to give it a try as an entrepreneur. In the coming 18 months he wants to build a prototype consisting of millions of nanomagnets. Through spontaneous or stimulated polarity reversal, each magnet generates current that flows directly into a device or to storage in a capacitor. With this the smallest devices, such as sensors or watches, could be constantly supplied with electrical energy. And already, from the observation of tiny magnets, an idea has arisen that could eventually shake up a 40-billion-market like the clock and watch industry.
Text: Joel Bedetti
Contact
Oles Sendetskyi
Laboratory of Micro and Nanotechnology
Paul Scherrer Institute, 5232 Villigen PSI, Switzerland
Telephone: +41 56 310 54 87, e-mail: oles.sendetskyi@psi.ch
Address for enquiries
Dr. Mirjam van Daalen
Head of Communications
Paul Scherrer Institute
CH-5232 Villigen PSI
Phone: +41 56 310 56 74
mirjam.vandaalen@psi.ch
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