How Dinko Valerio became a Dutch biotech icon with Crucell, ProQR Therapeutics, & Leyden Labs

00:17:42 – In biotech, there are two streams really. One – you either have a platform that allows you to create an almost unlimited number of different products or you are a gene therapy company, for example, that focuses on creating one product only.

In the case of the latter one, you need to be sure that there is a big enough market available to warrant the huge risk and the tremendous amount of money that is required to bring a drug to the marketplace.

Then when you develop a platform, you need to look at the product-market fit at a large scale: do you own this platform? Is the platform really performing in the way that you think it should? And what are the different ways to make money with that? We had this platform to make recombinant viruses that could be used for gene therapy. At some point, we realised that it could also be used for vaccines. But there are so many of those that it would be silly to commit as a company to focus on all these products.

On that note, you have Moderna which is truly a platform company. RNA technology can be used for an array of different things. They realised that the easiest way to use that technology is for vaccines. They managed to succeed because they raised sufficient funds – they were based in Boston after all. That allowed them to hire qualified people and take care of the product development themselves.