Twenty years ago, he dared to bet on physics to treat cancer. Today, his company is on the verge of revolutionizing radiotherapy worldwide. Laurent Levy is the president and co-founder of Nanobiotix, a French biotech pioneer in medical nanophysics. After two decades in the shadows, he is about to cross a historic milestone: a 2.6 billion euro deal with Johnson & Johnson and a regulatory submission that could make this technology a pillar of cancer treatment. He is already being called the future gem of French biotech. A meeting with an entrepreneur who never stopped believing that science can change the world. Atom by atom. We meet at the heart of biotech right after this jingle. Blank page.
40 shades of Next. So, this beautiful screen was made possible by our partner The Good Experience, whom we thank for making pink our universe for these 4 days. Very nice. Thank you, Laurent. You are a physicist by training, an entrepreneur by adoption. You do what we call in the jargon of deeptech, biotech, and your ambition, as I said in the intro, is to heal people and challenge the status quo in the very foundations of medicine. Can you explain?
Of course. What we see in general in the industry is that we have a quite monolithic approach to treating patients. Over the past five decades, there has been chemistry, then biology, and today everyone works around these concepts. And we decided, not because it's better but because it's different, to work with nanophysics to help patients, to bring new things, and especially to change the trend we see in our industry of making increasingly complex treatments that treat fewer and fewer patients, which are effective but reserved for a small portion of patients. What we want is to be able to treat millions of patients with our products and help humanity on a large scale.
So, as I said in the intro, it's been 20 years, 20 years that you've been in the shadows, 20 years that you've been working on these topics. How do you stay the course when you're moving against the current, especially in a very conservative industry like healthcare?
That's a good question. I don't think there are absolute rules for that. We all have different paths. But it's true that these past 20 years, we've worked hard to get where we are today. We've been through many stages. We had to raise a lot of money, over 300 million. We had to list on different stock exchanges like Euronext and NASDAQ, and above all, we have a fantastic team that we built, which allowed us to stay the course over the years. And in fact, these 20 years are a bit the price of disruptive innovation. You can't create a revolution in days. That was really our approach: to stay the course, to bring our products as we envisioned them. And today, we are on the verge of succeeding thanks to the Deeptech plan from BPI France, which was launched 5 years ago. They just celebrated their 5th anniversary.
And you, you started 20 years ago, you were a bit of a UFO being a physicist and becoming an entrepreneur.
Yes, that's really part of the journey. When you present something new, the first reactions were like, 'What is this thing?' or 'It's science fiction.' But over the years, with results and persistence, we end up convincing people of the importance and interest of what we do.
So, 20 million people are diagnosed with cancer in the world. Up to 12 million of them receive radiotherapy as part of their treatment. And you, there's a small paradox in these numbers: effectively, 60% of all cancer patients will receive radiotherapy. And these patients, they receive radiotherapy often at the beginning of their treatment, whereas our entire industry often focuses on patients who have received many treatments and are at the end of the possibilities of current treatments to develop new ones. Whereas the biggest impact we can have is when we treat them at the beginning of their illness and get good results. So our idea is to look at these 60% of patients, see where they are, what their needs are. And radiotherapy is something ultra-powerful that helps many patients, but it still has a limitation. In fact, when you have a tumor somewhere in the body surrounded by healthy tissue, you have to irradiate that tumor with radiotherapy. So you cause damage both in the tumor and the surrounding healthy tissue. So you are limited by the dose of radiotherapy you can deposit inside that tumor.
That's where we developed a unique solution for all patients. It consists of injecting nanoparticles, small objects that we designed to be super absorbers of X-rays, and we put them directly into the tumor. When the patient receives their radiotherapy, these particles will absorb the energy of the radiotherapy, deliver it inside the tumor, and destroy the cells much more effectively. So that was the initial concept, but we have shown many things. We have had many positive clinical trials that showed that this product works and can bring benefit to patients. Over the years, we have developed the feasibility of this treatment through many different indications around the world. And today, as you said in the intro, we are approaching the goal since next year we will see the final results, at least in one of the indications that would allow us to register the product and start commercialization. When I say 'we', it's Johnson & Johnson that has taken this product under license for months. Working with you to deploy this product. Exactly.
You have just been elected president of the TPM. You'll tell us quickly what that is, and more broadly, what message do you want to convey to Europe to accelerate the emergence of future gems like Nanobiotix?
So, the TBN is a European platform, the European Technology Platform for Nanomedicine, which brings together academics, startups, and industrialists all with the common goal of developing health products from nanotechnologies, whatever nanotechnologies they use. For me, what is important is that today we have enormous strength in Europe, a strength that is federated through this association and through other objects as well. And we can be the drivers of this nanomedicine around the world. That's really the objective I want to carry for the coming years, and also to accelerate all development. We have a huge number of good ideas, good projects under development, but quite often many problems, which is normal in transforming these ideas into products that can help patients day-to-day in hospitals. So our main goal will be to accelerate all of that.
No. Well, resistance in the healthcare field, which is a hyper-regulated field, what matters in the end is whether we have a product that is safe, whether it is administrable to the patient, whether there is a product that brings benefits to patients. And when we have these two prerequisites and there is an important unmet medical need, well, generally we find a path with partners to develop this product.
