Nordic Life Science 1
36 “In contrast, people in several European count
ries, seem to interweave academia with their professional career a bit more,” he continues, and gives us an example. “A student in the UK might, after having finished their Bachelor’s, move to a company and work there for a year or two before returning to school to do their Masters or an MBA. Having finished that, they might take another stint in the private sector before returning to do a PhD, and then move into a life science company.” His own studies took him to UC Berkeley, California, where he did research for his Master’s Thesis. After having graduated, Natanek moved into consulting, first at McKinsey and later as a Partner at Bain & Co in London. “There I split my time between serving life science companies and leading healthcare due diligences for private equity funds,” he describes. The benefit of working in an international management consulting firm is that you have the opportunity to serve different types of industries on a varied set of issues across the globe, he believes. “On the corporate side, I worked with management teams of healthcare, pharma, and medtech companies, helping them accelerate growth, enter new markets, improve their organizations, implement digital solutions, and pursue M&As.” On the private equity side, whilst at McKinsey and Bain he led over 50 due diligences of medium sized and global corporations across Europe and the USA. “The interesting part about healthcare private equity is that you get the opportunity to deeply assess different parts of the life science value chain, such as CROs, CDMOs, healthcare logistics, etc.,” Rafael says. Since the end of 2018 Rafael has worked as an investor with Gilde Healthcare Private Equity, located in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Gilde Healthcare Private Equity invests in the full range of healthcare businesses, be it pharma, pharma outsourcing, medtech outsourcing, patient care, services to clinics and healthcare IT. “We also have a large venture capital arm that invests in biotech, medtech and digital health,” he says. “We make investments across Northern Europe and the USA and have invested in several Nordic companies e.g., KLIFO, Admescope, and Ascendis Pharma.” On the private equity side, Rafael and his colleagues look for “growing profitable companies with high quality products/services that are run by a strong and ambitious management team.” One such example is Gilde’s investment in Symeres. “We initially entered the business in 2017 by merging two Dutch mid-sized CROs. We then worked with the management to help them invest in expanding lab capacity, accelerate their BD efforts whilst acquiring three additional companies. When we sold the company in 2021, Symeres had grown to become a leading independent integrated discovery/ pre-clinical CRO in Europe,” Rafael explains.