Nordic Life Science 1
angsbo also spent time at Leiden University Medic
al Center (LUMC) in the Netherlands, starting in 2009, working on a project where the goal was to improve synthetic long peptide vaccination. “The druggability is so much more than the target and drug interaction; it is about formulation, administration, indication, scalable production, regulatory requirements, and the development journeys are unique,” Mangsbo noted. “This comes along with delivering [products] on time and with the quality that the customer expects. Later comes the work of scaling up the business and marketing initiatives along with international business expansion,” Sara Mangsbo explains. As Immuneed also has a service business in advanced immunotoxicology assessments, Sara learned about the product/customer part as well. While the research was rewarding, Mangsbo wanted a means to put findings into practice as quickly as possible. “When you are in academia, you can’t always move research further,” she says. “It’s hard to translate findings into clinical trials. You need to build something within the industry. There are resources that help you to build your own company; if you are curious, you can get help – I was curious. You are pursuing the unknown in academia. Business is making an impact for someone else. It was important for me to have a good grounding lesson in academia. Now I can create in academia and build something useable in the industry.” The program mentor4research, which was nationally driven by IVA, helped Mangsbo get her business off the ground. In this program, her mentor Jörgen Lönngren, gave her the opportunity to meet his network. “To grow your network outside academia was very important for me to both learn and grow as a person and entrepreneur,” Mangsbo explained. “I was also later fortunate to receive a grant via UppsalaBIO that was a project that triggered me to start Immuneed AB. In this initially two-year program, there was an advisory board that I met with every six months and this helped me develop my knowledge in drug development. It also helped me to meet the first investors that allowed Immuneed to grow.” Besides the usual challenges of starting a company – finding startup funding, building up the laboratory, assembling a team that includes employees who have good customer skills – Mangsbo and her team had to learn to navigate the complicated paths of getting new pharmaceuticals to trials and the market. Initially one of Immuneed’s tasks was to craft a plan to enable a product to go to the clinic and to identify and recruit the right persons to enable the project to go through the clinical path required for a drug development project. 76 NORDICLIFESCIENCE.ORG Sweden has a valuable network of people with their own experiences in drug development who can provide assistance to newcomers to the trade. These are people who have advanced from their previous roles in drug development carried out at Pharmacia and AstraZeneca back in the day. “I also hope that Sweden can grow and strengthen its competence to support more companies in the field of biologics to maintain that global competitive edge in drug development,” she adds. he Nordic countries are fortunate to have strengths in various areas of life sciences, says Mangsbo. “Denmark has been strong in the immunocology field. Sweden has a history of building strong pharmaceutical companies. There is strong knowledge from the network of people in Sweden. In Norway, we have seen the buildup of an important cancer cluster initiative; they are clustering academia, hospital and industry, possibly facilitated by a more centralized oncology treatment journey that is present in Norway. In Sweden we can see a more decentralized treatment journey for the cancer patient. However, one strong initiative in Sweden right now is a combined umbrella and basket-trial initiative, named MEGALiT, as a joint alliance between several University hospitals in Sweden. This includes U-CAN, pharma companies and GMS (Genomic Medicine Sweden), and is coordinated from Uppsala. In addition Sweden has a strong drug development and discovery platform (DDD) at SciLife and Testa center, now celebrating 1 year, to spur the academic and industry knowledge in biologics drug development and production.”