'Tru­ly dif­fer­en­t': Roche's for­mer hema­tol­ogy leader shifts a new Ver­sant biotech in­to gear

While head­ing up the hema­tol­ogy unit at Roche/Genen­tech, Thomas Fuchs and his team “looked at every­thing” when try­ing to ad­dress the ar­eas of un­met need in blood-re­lat­ed dis­eases. An­ti­bod­ies, small mol­e­cules, cell ther­a­pies, you name it.

But when Alex May­weg, leader of Ver­sant Ven­tures’ Ridge­line Dis­cov­ery En­gine in Basel, Switzer­land, ap­proached Fuchs, he “im­me­di­ate­ly saw the po­ten­tial” in a new biotech born out of a lunch con­ver­sa­tion be­tween May­weg and Uni­ver­si­ty of Basel pro­fes­sor Lukas Jek­er.

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