Founder of the Swiss biotech company AMAL Therapeutics received the Women Innovator’s Prize for her cancer vaccine research.
Mariya Gabriel, Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, awarded Dr. Madiha Derouazi at the last year European Research and Innovation Days the Women Innovator’s Prize for exceptional innovations and talented entrepreneurship. This annual award intends to raise the profile of female entrepreneurs and attract more female leaders in Europe.
After working on cancer vaccines for over 10 years, Dr. Madiha Derouazi founded her startup AMAL Therapeutics in 2012. The origin of the name AMAL is Arabic and means “hope”, which is what Dr. Derouazi wants to give to cancer patients with her cancer vaccine platform. The research company is a spin-off from the University of Geneva, where Dr. Derouazi had worked in the oncology research laboratory. In 2019, the German pharmaceutics company, Boehringer Ingelheim, acquired AMAL for €325m.
Vaccines help a body to fight a disease by training the immune system to identify and destroy certain germs and cells. In developing vaccines to combat cancer, there are two different approaches – preventing or treating cancer. Dr. Derouazi focuses on therapeutic vaccines that treat patients for cancer that already has developed. She is now going a step further with AMAL and has developed the immunisation technology platform KISIMA, for therapeutic cancer vaccines. According to Dr. Derouazi, with KISIMA it will be possible to treat almost any cancer by modifying the right information in the vaccine. One single shot of the jab can generate the essential immune system response to a disease.
Currently, AMAL is testing its first cancer vaccine candidate, ATP128, for colorectal cancer in the United States, in Belgium and, since a few days ago, also in Switzerland. In this clinical trial phase, eligible cancer patients are receiving the very first doses of ATP128. Until the vaccine is approved and becomes commercially available, it nonetheless will take six to seven years and two further clinical trial phases.
AMAL is an international research company that collaborates with various academic and industrial partners. In Europe, AMAL is working closely with academic institutes such as the University of Innsbruck in Austria and the University of Tuebingen in Germany. On the industrial side, AMAL is partnering, amongst others, with an undisclosed French company.
The first funder of Dr. Derouazi’s biotech startup was the Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI), or today’s Innosuisse. AMAL received research support from CTI before targeting the EU Horizon Programmes. Together with TransCure bioService, a French preclinical contract research organisation, she received funding of €1.07m for the project, called HuVac. The project’s goal was to certify a new vaccine for human glioblastoma multiform (GMB), a type of brain tumour, by using an immune system mouse model for the development of vaccines.
This long journey towards innovation and finally benefiting cancer patients across Europe and beyond was not an expected one for Dr. Derouazi. In an interview with SwissCore, she explained that it never was her ambition to become an entrepreneur in the first place. However, she knew that, to help cancer patients with her discovery, she had to look to the startup world. Now, as a successful female entrepreneur in a male dominated sector, she wants to encourage other women to take their chances. Entrepreneurship is difficult for everyone – man or woman – she expressed. In the last few years, Dr. Derouazi was glad to see more women at least in the Swiss biotech field.