Executive Interview with Vincent Poher, Synthelis

0:03
Hi, everyone and thank you for joining us today.

0:07
I will be interviewing Vincent Poher, CEO of Synthelis of French biotech at the forefront approaching expression and self free systems.

0:16
Since acquiring the company in 2023, Vincent has led Synthelis through a strategic transformation.

0:24
So Vincent, great to have you with us.

0:26
And I guess first question is, could you briefly tell us a bit about yourself and what brought you to acquire and lead Synthelis in 2023?

0:36
OK, Thank you very much and hi, everyone.

0:39
So basically Synthelis was founded in 2011 as a company focusing only on services for protein expression and in particular difficult to express proteins, including membrane proteins.

0:55
So I had the first company called Avalon here in Grenoble in the in vitro diagnostics for coagulation.

1:02
And basically in the course of Avalon, I got to work with Synthelis to actually express membrane protein as a Regent for coagulation.

1:13
And to be honest, they did like an amazing job expressing a membrane protein to trigger coagulation that was traditionally purified from rapid brain basically.

1:30
And they did that all recombinant and synthetic.

1:35
And it worked very well actually.

1:37
And I sold my first company in 2021 and late 2023.

1:42
I've decided to acquire Synthelis for two reasons.

1:49
First, it's a great company, great team, great technology that can do pretty much everything and also with an amazing opportunity for change to switch from a service only company to a product driven company.

2:07
So and this is where we stand now.

2:11
We keep on doing services like expressing proteins and difficult proteins for our customers.

2:19
But at the same time, we have launched quite a few very innovative products in order to, you know, help support our customers to reach biology at speed in different fields.

2:34
Perfect.

2:35
And what was your vision for Synthelis when you took over?

2:40
And how would you say it's evolved in the past year or two?

2:43
Yeah.

2:44
So as I said, so the service part is continuing and it is actually growing, you know, thanks to a higher demand for binders expression for instance VHH mini binders and so on and enzyme optimization.

3:04
And actually our proprietary cell free system is an open system that can be optimised very much for any kind of protein up to 200 kilodalton and that helps our client to get faster some biologics to for testing.

3:29
And since then we have launched different kind of products.

3:32
We have launched Cell Free kits, either of the shelf kits, amongst the best cell free kits on the market in terms of yield and protein activity, but also custom made kits.

3:45
As I said, you know, cell free is an amazing tool, it's a very powerful tool, but if you want to get the most out of it, you should optimise your cell free recipe for a given protein or class of protein.

4:00
And this is what we do.

4:02
We actually optimise it by testing a huge amount of different recipes and then we provide an optimised sell free kit for our customers.

4:14
That's the first product line.

4:16
The second product line is bioluminescence.

4:19
So we have launched a bioluminescence substrate called icarazine that has been developed at the CNRS and Situ Pasteur in France, which is amazingly bright, which is very stable at room temperature for several years as a pro substrate, which is very soluble and which is much cheaper than competition.

4:42
So basically it helps also our customers to gain speed and to save money of course.

4:51
And if you combine both cell free and bioluminescence read out together with artificial intelligence for the design of experiments and protein optimization, then you've got an amazing tool for high throughput protein expression effect.

5:12
And I guess you've already touched on this a little bit already, but if you had to like summarise in a sentence or two, why is cell free expression technology such a game changer for your biotech and pharma partners?

5:26
And what specific problems in their pipelines can this solve?

5:32
Yeah, so basically the value proposition of cell free is it's twofold.

5:37
The first is you can do things that are very difficult in cellulose system such as expressing toxins or inserting non natural amino acid in proteins or labelled amino acids.

5:51
So that's the first thing.

5:54
Also expressing membrane protein and we have patterns where we add liposomes during the expression system in our cell free in order for the membrane protein to fall directly in the lipid bilayer of the liposomes.

6:08
And we've done lots of GPCRS, ion channels, all the hot topics in membrane protein we've got we've made quite a few.

6:18
And the second thing, the second value proposition is to save time.

6:23
For instance, we can express VHH or nano bodies using our optimised VHH cell free system with linear DNA.

6:38
So within 48 hours you've got as many mutants as you want and you can start doing, you know, binding assays and stuff like that.

6:49
So something that takes you know, weeks or months, you can do it in hours or days using self free.

7:01
And would you say this is something that gives you an edge over your competitors or other traditional expression methods that are on the market?

7:11
Well, I would say it's complementary.

7:14
If you've got a very good E colised, you know, expression system that is working with your with an existing protein, just don't change it.

7:24
It's just fine.

7:26
Now if you are struggling with your protein or during the drug discovery phase, if you really want to save time to identify for some good candidates, definitely cell free is an option.

7:39
And saving time is also saving money.

7:44
So definitely it's self free should be considered.

7:51
And earlier you briefly mentioned that Santelis has launched this new bioluminescence substrate that is brighter than existing market options.

8:01
Could you maybe explain a bit more what are the main applications of this and the impact of this innovation for researchers and partners?

8:10
So bio luminescence is actually very a very powerful tool in a way that it's a biologically labelled for proteins.

8:21
So for instance, if you want to do gene expression, it's very powerful.

8:25
If you want to do a protein interaction.

8:28
If you study protein interaction is very powerful tool.

8:32
If you want to do small animal imaging as well, it's very powerful tool and in bio luminescence, having a very good and efficient substrate is absolutely key.

8:44
It's paramount if you want to actually get enough light out of your assay and if you want to basically have a meaningful results and of course price matters goes by let me since tend to be an expensive technique.

9:01
So we have something like 150 already existing users, all of them are super happy with Ikarazin and it's, it is actually getting very strong momentum now.

9:18
It's great to hear.

9:21
And one of the other upcoming milestones is the launch of your high throughput platform, which I believe is anticipated to take place at the end of this year.

9:32
Could you tell us a little bit more about this?

9:35
Yeah, right now this is a high throughput expression platform that we use in house to save time for our, you know, service protein expression service.

9:49
But basically there are two parts of it.

9:52
The first part is optimising your cell free recipe for a given protein or a given class of protein.

9:59
And this for this we use artificial intelligence to basically check for many different recipes by, you know, screening additives, chaperones, salts and so on.

10:12
So we know we can find the best recipe for your protein and by doing so, you can increase the yield by a factor of 10 to 20 for a given protein compared to a non optimised self risk system.

10:27
So that's, you know, the first block and second block, it's about, you know, expressing thousands or 10 thousands of mutants use it from linear DNA in a very fast manner.

10:41
That's that block was funded by Sanofi by the Idi tech awards.

10:48
So we were low rate in 2024.

10:52
And actually it's, it is working nice.

10:56
And as you said, we're going to launch it as a platform probably at the end of the year for, you know, CIOs or research centres that are actually trying to express thousands of mutants very quickly.

11:13
Sounds very exciting.

11:15
And your company, as you mentioned earlier, has gone undergone this major change from pure purely services to services and products.

11:25
What do you think motivated this change?

11:31
Well, a few things.

11:33
First, it's a demand from our customers.

11:37
So basically when you do service only your customer just rely on your team.

11:44
Now as I said, when we have optimised the cell free, we give the opportunity to our customer to just use it in its lab.

11:53
So they do the expression by themselves, they do the purification of the protein by themselves and they do the characterization by themselves.

12:01
And basically all we do is selling, you know, the expression system, optimised expression system to them.

12:09
So that's the first thing.

12:10
And 2nd bioluminescence by definition is a product and it was of great interest for our partners and customers.

12:22
So basically this is how we wanted to, you know, grow the company.

12:30
And what have been the main challenges in executing this transition for you?

12:36
Yeah, it's growing the team with people who are used to develop, maintain and sell products.

12:45
It's quite different.

12:47
It's not exactly the same reference in a way that, yeah, when you develop a product, you should make, you should rely on the quality management system.

13:01
You should be able to sell always very efficient and performing products and you should be able to maintain this product over the, you know, over time.

13:16
Nice.

13:17
And I believe that Synthelis received a grant from France 2030 to kind of bolster your bioproduction capabilities.

13:27
And I guess could you sum up what this support would mean for your company and maybe how on a wider scale it will establish France's position as a strong player in biotech?

13:40
Yeah.

13:41
So since 2011, basically we support our customer in the drug discovery phase, OK, just to identify candidates or to help them express difficult to express protein.

13:55
And we have expressed more than 400 proteins for different customers, big pharma, biotech companies, academic labs and so on.

14:04
But the next step is to give the insurance to our customers that if we help them in the drug discovery phase, they can use the same cell-free system at scale and GMP grade.

14:19
And this is actually the grant that we just got.

14:23
We were just notified a few weeks ago to scale up our cell free system to GMP grade.

14:30
And that's yeah.

14:31
So we're getting there and the idea is to support our customers up to the, you know, clinical trials and the industrial transfer.

14:44
Very exciting indeed.

14:45
And where do you see Synthelis in the next two to three years as you continue, I guess building your reputation, scaling your services and products?

14:57
Yeah, exactly.

14:58
So our vision is really to help our client getting speed and quality at the same time.

15:07
So basically, we will, you know, support them by enlarging the services by getting also our self free to GMP grade as well and at scale and also developing a range of bioluminescence assay in order for them to, you know, find faster and more efficiently, you know, candidates and study like fundamental science with more precision.

15:39
Perfect.

15:40
And I guess final question from me is as a CEO, what has been the most rewarding aspect of leading a biotech company through such a major strategic and technological transformation?

15:55
Yeah, I mean we halfway through the transformation, but I have to say that the biggest satisfaction for CEO is when all plans come together.

16:08
So you need to, you have a strategic plan, you listen to your customers, you have also technological development, you build up a team, you finance the company.

16:20
And at the end of the day, when it all comes together, it's yeah, it's an amazing journey.

16:26
It's an amazing journey really.

16:28
And I'd say human speaking, it's yeah, it's great adventure.

16:36
It's great to hear.

16:36
So I think that's everything from me.

16:39
So, Vincent, thank you for sharing your insights.

16:43
And, you know, the exciting direction that Synthelis heading definitely seems like a very exciting time for you and your company.

16:50
And to the viewers, thank you for tuning in, and we will see you next time.

16:56
Bye.

16:57
Thank you very much.