Post by Roman Thomas

Building DISCO from scratch - together with an amazing team - and leading as its CEO was: a huge privilege and years of energizing work, filled with exciting discoveries! I am thrilled to share that Mark Manfredi, an accomplished biotech leader, takes over as DISCO’s CEO. Mark is an exceptional scientist, has successfully raised large rounds and taken molecules into the clinic. I have no doubt that he is the ideal CEO to stear DISCO through the next phase of growth and into the clinic. We have also closed another financing led by Ackermans & van Haaren and NRW.BANK, with participation from founding investors, Sofinnova Partners, AbbVie Ventures, MVentures and Panakes Partners Ventures. With the new capital, DISCO is in ideal position to bring new cancer therapies to patients. I am grateful to our investors for their (continued) believe in DISCO. The idea of DISCO was born in 2017 together with Julien Sage (Stanford professor and DISCO co-founder). Inspired by signs of activity of an ADC in small cell lung cancer (SCLC), we envisioned a technology for scalable surface target discovery to overcome the bottleneck for surface-directed therapeutics: the lack of targets. We also speculated that protein pairs in physical proximity to one another could be targeted by antibodies that only bind with high affinity when bound to both targets simultaneously (the AND-gate). This ultimately became DISCO’s magic sauce: novel cancer medicines enabled by scalable discovery of ultra-clean drug targets and target pairs. We tried for years to find the right approach, but it took until 2020, when Bernd Wollscheid (ETH professor and DISCO co-founder), introduced us to his technology to directly identify proteins and protein communities on the cell surface. His work laid the technological foundation for DISCO’s core platform, DISCOtech. Johannes Heuckmann (co-founder and COO), longtime fellow entrepreneur, forged the scientific ideas and technology into a biotech business model. DISCO was launched in May 2022 in Cologne and Zürich - at a time, when markets were not in favor of oncology platform companies. Since then, DISCOtech delivered countless novel surface proteins and protein communities on SCLC and later, colorectal cancer. The reason for the rich yield of high-confidence targets is the combination of physico-chemical labeling and subsequent direct identification. I have rarely seen a technology yield such a great harvest of high-quality data. Based on these data, DISCO has created several mono-targeting as well as AND-gated dual-targeting ADCs and we now have confirmation that the foundational concept and molecules work. With the company having reached this important milestone and the new financing, I am pleased to pass the baton to Mark for the next phase of our journey. I will continue to support DISCO as an advisor. Thanks to everyone at DISCO Pharmaceuticals GmbH for your trust and hard work! Nothing would have been possible without you!