What is Smart Immune, the French biotech that seduced the Bill Gates Foundation, doing?

5 million dollars and an entry into the capital. For the first time, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is backing a French biotech company: Smart Immune, specialized in cell therapy.

This company has developed ProTCell, a therapy that restores the capacities of the immune system more quickly and whose perspectives have visibly convinced the foundation of the American billionaire and his ex-wife.

BFM Business guest Karine Rossignol, co-founder and CEO of Smart Immune, explains the concept: “We rearm the immune system very quickly, both against cancer and against infections after a transplant. We have developed a new type of cell therapy, a new type of cell that is capable of being educated very quickly by your body.”

Going further in HIV treatment

Main interest, the speed of the response: “Normally it takes 18 months for a normal transplant, we are going to reduce that to 100 days and that is very important to change the prognosis of the patients”, he adds and limits the rejections with the example .

How did Smart Immune convince the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation?

“We are lucky to have a president, Sebastián Lombardo, who is very involved with us and met the Foundation in Vancouver, told them about us, they knew what we were capable of doing with our techno. So we pitched in front of the scientists from the Foundation”, the latter having to validate “if our science is sustained or not. They have that reputation of being very demanding”.

This investment must also go further in treating HIV, at the heart of the Gates Foundation’s goals, and across a range of diseases.

“We are going to rebuild an immune system that is resistant to the AIDS virus and that is what they are interested in here. They are going to finance a first adult acute leukemia trial” for other treatments. “It’s a long-term collaboration,” adds Karine Rossignol.

What also attracts other investment funds, “will help us”, assures the leader who, however, is interested in the European tropism of biotechnology and who points to a new fundraising of 50 million euros this year.