Naji Gehchan: Welcome to SpreadLove in Organizations, the healthcare leadership podcast where we explore leadership with purpose.
I am Naji, your host for this special episode in partnership with Boston Biotechnology Summit, a bridge to collaboration and innovative synergies between healthcare stakeholders. I am joined today Benjamin Hadida co-founder of Exeliom Biosciences, a clinical-stage biotech company founded in 2016 in France, winner of the Biotech Summit Pitch this year. With experience spanning investment banking, venture capital, regulatory affairs, biotech operations, and applied research, Benjamin brings a multidisciplinary perspective to biotech innovation. He holds master’s degrees in Management from ESSEC Business School, and Molecular and Cellular Biology from Sorbonne. Under his leadership, Exeliom has raised $29 million to develop EXL01, a groundbreaking microbiome-based immunomodulator targeting the innate immune system. This first-in-class therapy is now in Phase 2 trials for Immuno-oncology, Inflammatory Bowel Diseases and Infectious Diseases.
I’d love first to hear more about your personal story before we go into the biotech world. What brought you to found and lead now Excellium?
Benjamin Hadida: Really it was the willingness to create my dream job and I was not able to find it. There’s a lot of biotech activities in France but not so many biotech companies developing actual novel drugs and the number of options were very limited.
But the science is excellent with all these academic institutions creating a lot of new opportunities there. So the idea was just okay let’s meet an excellent scientific team and create the dream job. I love that and kind of like how did you land into knowing that health care, biotech is kind of your dream and what you want to do in your life? So yeah it’s a good question because at the start I had a very generalist background.
I did the preparatory schools in France and then went to ESSEC business school where I was mostly studying corporate finance. But then I was trying to find an area where I could apply this knowledge and I was immediately attracted by the health care because there was something more to it. We were talking about life and death, about ethical issues and I had this opportunity to discover the field through an innovation therapeutic share at ESSEC business school and then I went to Amgen and definitely I fell in love with the complexity of this field.
So from generalistic to you’ve worked in pharma, you’ve worked in venture capital and now really building the company since it’s been nine years on your anniversary. So tell us more about this journey and how it started and I’m sure it’s a roller coaster of a journey as any biotech. Can you tell us a little bit more about your key learning as you’ve been building this venture? To be honest it’s better not to know everything before you start especially as you’re developing a first-in-class modality.
I mean it’s already a first-in-class but it’s also a novel modality so there were so many question marks and to be honest I tried to present it to the people I met. So first of all my co-founders but also my first investors. I tried to convince them that because you know it would be the first time for me that I would do these things I would do better than anyone else because I would give it everything but while keeping the openness you know because my starting point was I don’t know anything so I would go talk to as many people who were supposed to know and then practice my best judgment to make the next decision and little by little we start building this project and the organization around it but really it was tailor-made.
We were not applying any recipe and you know very early on we decided not to have any C-level in the company for instance because we would not have the resources, we didn’t know exactly where we would go with this project, there was no regulatory roadmap, there was nothing written for us. So first decision was to to be completely virtual, no C-level, the experienced people would be outside of the company, they would also evolve with the project and within the company we would have only super project managers basically with no particular experience in drug development but the willingness to learn and this is how we started and I guess this is the reason why we’re able to do what we did. We basically took an academic program with a few slides some great publications but in terms of project just a few slides and we took it to a candidate that is now in phase two that has been seen by many agencies including the FDA and it was really because we were the first one to do what we did and it was the first time as well for us.
It was some kind of a combination of both that made it a success I guess. This is an incredible story and now congrats you’re in phase two, you’re pretty advanced, you have enough runway, you managed to raise 29 million through the years in Europe which is not something simple I would say. What is kind of your biggest learning if you have to pick one? What is the biggest learning for others who are now starting their companies and going into from pre-clin IND or those early stages to becoming clinical stage companies? Yeah the biggest learning is always I ask the question and that’s a question that you should ask almost every day it’s what does the program need and not what do you need or what does your company need but what does the program need because at the end of the day when you look at the valuation even of the company you’re not going to value the people or the many pre-clinical programs that you have especially in this economy the only thing that are valued are the clinical stage assets so our key question was what our lead program needs to be in the clinic as fast as possible in a valuable way and you know to kind of identify what has value and what doesn’t have value and it’s complicated because you know when you are in love with your science with your innovation you see value in a lot of things even in your manufacturing unit because you think it’s unique and you need know-how and so on but before I started this company I had this experience in another biotech company where I was not the co-founder I was just a simple employee and I could see what you know what happens when a biotech falls and at the end of the day what the investor and the financial people will look at and the way you know they put numbers on things and this is very rude and crude and there are not that many things at the end of the day that have value for these guys so to keep your eyes on what do I value and be focused on that seems easy and obvious but that’s not.
Yeah I agree it’s not and it’s I think related to that there are many aspects right like when you’re focusing on what the program needs to bring this innovation and help patients you need to create a culture within the teams and the leaders you bring on and you work with to be able to transcend one’s self-interest and egos and literally work on what’s best for the assets you have to bring it to patients so I think it’s not an easy question but if you manage to do it it talks a lot I think on how you the culture you created. And you know one of the key aspects for that was I know it sounds a bit counterintuitive but in the way we build the company the scientific co-founders they were extremely involved but they were not employees of the companies so they were active consultant or board members but they were outside of the company and our deal from the beginning was that my job would be at some point to tell them things that they won’t like because I would defend the program and at some point the program interest might deviate from their scientific vision or interest and this is something that is not easy as well you know initially we were funded with a major focus in IBD this is where our co-founders came from and at some point we made this prioritization to go to oncology and you know it was massively accepted because and with the support of the co-founders because we set the rules right from the start and they all understood that it was what was best for the program so at some point it’s exactly what you say you you isolate the program and the program has its own interest vision and road map and that’s a great example you know as building companies I’ve had this experience even with startups I just had an idea like kudos to you having those tough conversations in the beginning usually we try to say that you know like we’ll start who knows what it goes and then you know you have tougher conversations later but it’s not the ideal case by learning is also like having those tough conversations in the beginning is crucial for the success of the company and and you’re showing it here tell me more now we’ve mentioned that but tell me briefly about the science what’s what do you do what’s novel in your approach I’ve heard your pitch obviously so I’m a little bit biased but tell me from your lens about your science yeah maybe I can I can I can I can tell about it the way it really started and that’s really interesting because it’s a bit the opposite roadmap of the conventional drug development normally you have a target identify that has some scientific rational you design something to eat that target and you go for it right in our case it’s all started with clinical observations is so just physicians trying to understand why some patients were responding to immunotherapy and why those were not responding and one of our co-founders are is one of the pioneers in trying to get this understanding by looking at the gut microbiome was one of the first to do that and barely early on with not the tools that we have today but the tools that we had 20 years ago he identified a signal which was a particular gut bacteria and then took it to the lab and identify with our other co-founders that in fact this bacteria had a lot of specificities in terms of properties and really it’s only 20 years later that we had the breakthrough where we understood the mechanism of action where it’s while we’re in phase two that we really were able to identify the target that we eat and the cells that we eat and so on with this bacteria so in terms of modality it looks simple we only basically have this master cell bank with one strain a specific strain that we selected from this good bacterial species that is called bacterium prosnitzi we grew it we freeze dried put it in a capsule that is designed to release it in the lower part of the intestine and and then we use it really as an immunomodulator and what we’ve identified in fact this bacteria is carrying on its membrane a specific structure that binds to not two which is an innate immune receptor that is particularly fine it found in macrophages and monocytes yellow itself basically that are particularly present around the intestine so this is really interesting in terms of delivery and when when the bacteria binds to not two or this component binds to not two it acts as a super agonist of not two and activates not two in a very specific way that then makes the the whole system more able to respond to immunotherapy so if you’re in the IBD setting that would be NTTNF if you’re in oncology that would be the immune checkpoint inhibitor and what is very interesting is that not two there’s a lot of rationale in these different therapeutic areas because that’s an immunomodulator that can take macrophages either to an anti-inflammatory phenotype or pro-inflammatory phenotype and this is very context driven so at the beginning we thought we were developing an anti-inflammatory drug based on this bacteria because in the inflammatory setting the effect that you drive is an anti-inflammatory effect but in fact this is not an anti-inflammatory drug that’s just an immunomodulator that activates macrophages so that they do what they’re supposed to do in the context they are so in the context of checkpoint inhibitors in oncology the effect is completely the opposite and you boost the macrophages so that they will help you respond better to immunotherapy and so that’s why now we’ve got phase two trials both in oncology and in Crohn’s disease with the same candidate. This is great and so tell me more I’m intrigued about you know like obviously I’m in immunology too so there is this immunomodulation you’re talking based on the contact so how do you see yourself as a company and as this drug develops is it an add-on it’s an enhancer sometimes for whatever immunological treatment you would have? That’s exactly our vision for this product you know you need to know your product and what it can and cannot do and this is really an add-on positioning it will enhance the response of checkpoint inhibitors the objective is to have more patients responding to these treatments when you combine to it so actually our flagship trial in gastric cancer it’s in first line gastric cancer in combination with chemotherapy and nivolumab and we have a control group where they only take chemotherapy and nivolumab and yeah the idea is really to have more patients responding with the presence of the bacteria and in the context of immunology in Crohn’s disease we are either in monotherapy for the patients that you know where anti-TNF are too toxic for them and there is a major need for these patients because there is just nothing that is given to them if the patient or the physician think that the anti-TNF is too toxic or it can be as an add-on to anti-TNF but definitely the vision is we see that as a boost we helped the immune system to be in a better state for the patients to respond to these treatments we do not really see it as a shock treatment or monotherapy doesn’t make sense to us and this is this is awesome you talked about like you kind of shaping the way it’s true like this was a lot of ideas about microbrome I’m really like it’s great you guys are in phase two and getting there but what is currently you see as your biggest challenge or barrier for you to get to the next stage of getting this to market it’s um I mean if we’re successful with our current trials um I mean either in in oncology or in IBD the next step will require a partnership with the pharma and our biggest challenge right now is to get the pharma on board to educate the pharma regarding this microbiome-based therapies they I mean they had they had been in the past a frenzy regarding microbiome with a number of company raising a lot of money and they did not execute well and we just need to educate pharma to basically they know that already but based on positive data that would be generating to explain that you know there are a million ways to do something and we’re doing right with this very control and defined candidate with an identified target and mechanism with also the right application because you know maybe the companies before us they expected a bit too much from this type of modalities and they did not position it well and most of the time they developed it as a monotherapy in inflammatory settings and it was maybe too much to ask we’re really convinced that what you can expect from these therapies is a long-term effect their strength is their safety profile not their potency but their other strength is to activate the immune system in a non-suppressive way in a different way something that was not done before and as we all know in the immuno setting you need different angles different strategy to combine to have the best effect and we cannot ignore the microbiome components the people I talked to in the pharma world they know that they they are very interested in the microbiome science they just don’t see yet a modality they don’t see yet the the conversion into a product so this is what we need to bring to them show them that in phase two we de-risk the regulatory the manufacturing now the the efficacy and this is not rocket science I mean it already exists when you look at the BCG vaccines on these type of things we’re not that far away in fact the people that evaluate our dossier the FDA are the exact same people that evaluate vaccines because this is the same type of manufacturing it’s just that you do not attenuate the strain because the strain here is good for you but the rest is uh is very similar so it’s not that surprising in a way that’s that’s great and really best of luck with uh with that and again the opportunity you have is you will have data as you said and this is kind of yeah exactly what we live and breathe for summer 2026 and final readout in 27 so uh yeah awesome it’s coming awesome uh I’m gonna now give you a word and I would love your first reaction to it the first word is leadership it’s uh put yourself behind the others not in front of that what about entrepreneurship don’t get any ideas just uh just discover it your way don’t try to to have other people explain it for you microbiome it’s uh for me it’s uh it’s it’s um the other space I mean it’s a the other space discovery uh and it’s fascinating spread love and organizations you cannot you cannot be successful without love any final word of wisdom for healthcare leaders around the world yeah just keep your uh your mind open uh don’t get stuck into uh uh to what the the financial people ask you to do well thank you so much again for being with me today and this great thank you so much thank you so much Najee it was nice talking to you thanks for listening to the show more episodes summarizing the boston biotech summit are available on spreadloveio.com or on your preferred podcast app make sure to follow us let’s inspire change together and make a positive impact in healthcare one story at a time
Naji Gehchan: Thanks for listening to the show! For more episodes, make sure to subscribe to Spreadloveio.com or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Let’s inspire change together and make a positive impact in healthcare, one story at a time.
Follow us on LinkedIn and connect with us on spreadloveio.com. We’re eager to hear your thoughts and feedback. Most importantly, spread love in your organizations and spread the word around you to inspire others and amplify this movement, our world so desperately needs