SUN Bioscience is a pioneer in the use of organoids for drug development and personalised therapies. Now the market is taking off and the EPFL spin-off needs to accelerate if it wants to take advantage of the great opportunities. UBS provides support to SUN in terms of financing and advice.
Lab-grown mini-organs, so-called organoids, are revolutionising medicine and drug development. Since they enable more reliable tests than today's tissue samples, they reduce the likelihood that a drug fails at a late stage of development, which always results in high costs. If organoids are grown from cells of cancer patients, for example, the effect of different drugs can be tested quickly and without dangerous side effects before choosing the best therapy for a particular patient. This approach is referred to as precision medicine, one of the big trends in life science.
SUN Bioscience, a spin-off of EPFL, is one of the pioneers. It was founded in 2016 by Nathalie Brandenberg and Sylke Hoehnel, who today both serve as co-CEOs. The core of SUN's innovations is a culture system for growing organoids based on stem cells. The robotic platform enables a standardised procedure to perform image-based organoid assays.
"When we founded the company, the approach was completely new and we first had to educate the market," explains Nathalie Brandenberg. But that has now changed. In 2020, the market started to move, in 2021 the market slowly picked up speed and now it is already growing exponentially.
SUN is one of the drivers of this development and is growing rapidly as well. In 2022, the first major partnership with a big pharma company was signed, and next year two to three more partnerships are expected to follow. “For this year, we expect a doubling of turnover, and in 2023 at least a fivefold increase,” explains Brandenberg.
SUN’s culture systems are currently used in drug development. Candidates are screened in high-throughput processes in order to identify better compounds. At the same time, the team is expanding the company’s field of activity on several levels. A second product line with more complex organoids is being developed. In addition, the company is working on a product that can also be used in clinical trials.
Ultimately, SUN also wants to enable tests for individual patients with its products and thus make precision medicine a reality. “We expect that tests for the first diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, will be used in practice in the next five years,” says Brandenberg. More complex diseases like cancer will follow in the next decade. By the standards of the life sciences industries, these are very short time horizons.
The exploding market poses new challenges for the Lausanne-based start-up. Competition has intensified, for example. “We have to significantly accelerate the company’s development if we want to take advantage of our opportunity as a pioneer in the field,” explains the co-CEO.
UBS Growth Advisory as financing partner
Given its unique positioning and high degree of innovation SUN attracted the interest from UBS Growth Advisory as financing partner . The specialist team at UBS provides different types of growth loans from the bank’s balance sheet and also runs equity fundraising processes for scaleup companies to find suitable investors. "We have entered into a long-term partnership with UBS, which is crucial in helping us finance the growth phase," says Brandenberg.
The financing partnership was triggered by the SEF.Growth programme which UBS is sponsoring as a founding partner. The experts on this platform put the start-up through its paces. "The very precise and sharp questions of the expert panel helped us to move forward," comments the founder. After a successful review, SUN not only gained access to UBS funding, but was also awarded the SEF Growth high potential label. As a result, the team will now continue to be coached by the experts. One focus will be on the management of rapid growth. But strategic questions will also be addressed. It is not yet clear how the market will develop and what the best business models for SUN will look like. In such a situation, the advice of experienced experts is worth its weight in gold.
More information about UBS Growth Advisory can be found on its website.
Photo: Nathalie Brandenberg (l.) and Sylke Hoehnel with SUN CFO Jeroen van den Oever (plume.photo)
The new Swiss Venture Capital Report was published on 26 January. It analyses 304 financing rounds closed in 2020 and includes further article such as an interview with Michael Hengartner, President of the ETH Board, and a list of Swiss "soonicorns". 
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