TissueMatcher

Hi Hugo, how are you today?

Very well, great to be here. Many challenges currently both professionally and in my personal life, but let’s stay optimistic and as the saying goes: All’s well that ends well.

Thank you for the opportunity to interview you for TissueMatcher. To get right to the point. You have quite a list of achievements. Research on stem cells, and a fair share number of citations. Why do you find medical science, and in particular stem cell research so fascinating?

Well, my first “real” job, i.e. still as a student when I was finishing my degrees, and after my studies in the early 2000s, was actually in the middle in the up-and coming field of regenerative medicine and stem cell therapy for heart disease such as heart failure.

The option to develop a cure for millions of patients with debilitating diseases such as heart failure or diabetes mellitus and others remains a highly exciting proposition.

A passionate and dedicated man, I hear. What was key for you to follow this professional journey in hindsight. Tell us a bit more about your background?

(Laughs) Actually, I didn’t really have a real plan. After my studies, I pursued the opportunities that came along my path. If there was a plan, it was basically the idea to make sure that all my activities would in some way add to my personal and professional development and enrich my life and that of others in a way that if I looked back, I could say that I was happy I did this and that.

As a child I was curious and liked biology. Our family moved from Leiden to Eindhoven in the 80s, which was a big change, and in hindsight it’s ironic that Eindhoven turned out to be such a big (bio)technology hub, but back in the day it was still a village.

Still in my early teens, my dad, who is a retired psychiatrist, once gave me a microscope kit and microscopy books, and I was eventually even making microscopic slides of dividing chromosomes in the tips of onion sprouts in our kitchen, which I still have pictures of somewhere taken with an old-school mirror reflex camera. In high school, initially, I was quite lazy, and spent 30 minutes on home work so I could play with my brother who was then still in the “basisschool”. My grades were bad and my teachers told me I wasn’t capable of biology, chemistry, physics, and math. Now, I am also stubborn and when you tell me something is impossible I want to prove the opposite, so I started spending more time on the “beta” subjects, and eventually graduated with 8s and 9s on my final report, in order to go to Leiden University.

Well, I personally think the world is currently in a relatively stable phase with regards to stem cell therapy for regenerative purposes; the initial “hype” phase has been replaced by a more consolidated phase where a lot of research is taking place.

Dr. Hugo Sondermeyer

There, I completed medicine and biomedical sciences, but also was active in fraternity life at Leiden’s students’ corps, which I still visit when I am in the country, and which has also greatly enriched my life because I met so many people that I still see as of today.

Another big event after university was the opportunity to work in stem cell research in New York City at one of the top medical centers, Columbia University Medical Center. I mean not only the time at work, but also outside, where I learned a completely new vision on life and existence. It took me several years to get used to the “New York attitude”, but once I got the hang of it, it was real thrill to be part of such a dynamic community and be able to blend in with the locals.

I met my wife who is originally from Tokyo in New York and after my time, we decided to raise our family closer to home, split between the Netherlands and Japan. There, I worked in several different academic, medical and pharmaceutical institutions and organizations, and finalized my PhD thesis, which is focused on stem cell transplantation and bioengineering. Based on the inventions of my PhD projects, I founded a biomaterials company. Excited about the opportunities and my positive experience around biomedical entrepreneurship, together with an old study friend Theun (“Tony”) Kok,  who moved from the medical field into IT, we founded TissueMatcher, a stem cell based business based on HLA matching in the blockchain.

Much research on stem cells is taking place. Therapies are being used more and with increasing success. The demand for stem cells is high on a personal and industrial level. Current matching is greatly delayed by queues and availability. What are the biggest breakthroughs in cell therapy right now?

Well, I personally think the world is currently in a relatively stable phase with regards to stem cell therapy for regenerative purposes; the initial “hype” phase has been replaced by a more consolidated phase where a lot of research is taking place. A recent search on stem cell therapy on clinicaltrials.gov yielded a total of almost 7.000 clinical trials worldwide, with more than 1.000 actively recruiting. Very exciting work is going on in the field of blood vessel engineering, where long artificial patent blood vessels are being created out of stem cells and biomaterials. This is important because without blood vessels the stem cells are deprived of oxygen and nutrients and will perish quickly in a live organism. Also, the discovery of regulatory T-cells, which are in fact a type of stem cells, that can help the immune system avoid rejection of transplanted organs is a major breakthrough.

What solutions are we definitely going to hear about in the coming years?

The opportunity of personalized medicine by creating your own organ-in-a-dish or organ-on-a-chip and using those mini-organs to test different kinds of therapies to find the best result holds great promise.

I frankly think that big pharma generally sees stem cell therapy as a threat, since these therapies provide options to cure disease without the necessity of lifelong medication. 

Dr. Hugo Sondermeyer

Although we’ve seen decent government funding going to private-public partnerships for years, the number of stem cell donors is decreasing and waiting lists are increasing. How do you explain that?

My explanation is that people have become wary of stem cell research, but I can only speculate on the reasons. In my experience, there has been some negative publicity from studies, which is unfortunately sometimes caused by cowboys-in-the-field who are looking for a quick fix. The subjects of regenerative stem cell therapy and bioengineering are highly complex and need to be investigated without cutting corners. I think that the number of patients who would benefit from stem cell therapy is increasing due to a larger number of people with degenerative diseases in an aging population. Of course, you need suitable donors too, and sometimes it is simply impossible to find a matching stem cell donor.

I would hope to see pharmaceutical companies and biotechnology and bioengineering companies work in parallel to find the best cure for individual patients with serious illnesses at a reasonable price.

Dr. Hugo Sondermeyer

We see many start-ups in the biotech sector, each within their own research domain and application area. Do you foresee more collaborations or just more competition between them? How does Tissuematcher help?

This is a difficult question without a single answer. It depends (as always). In my opinion, and as a trustful person not very interested in crushing fellow players, it’s preferable to be able to collaborate with others. However, I have been surprised by some of the tactics people are able to use that eventually undermine fruitful collaborations. It taught me to always be aware, but as we say in Holland: “Trust comes per feet but leaves per horse”. In other words, it takes time to build trustful relationships, but once they are established, the results are generally superior compared to playing political games.

The strength of TissueMatcher is that it can only succeed if different parties work together to setup a global network of stem cell and tissue matching services. We will promote that point of view when discussing this with different potential partners. The proposition would be that an individual existing institute can decide to keep operating as an island, or connect with TissueMatcher which will facilitate the matching of stem cell profiles between different parties on a global scale. Since it will be a global enterprise, competing on a local level would actually be foolish and almost immoral, since it means people who may need a matching donor will not be able to find it when the data is not available within TissueMatcher’s database.

What has been the role of big pharma so far in this competitive field, and more specifically with respect to stem cell research and applications?

This is another difficult one, and I frankly think that big pharma generally sees stem cell therapy as a threat, since these therapies provide options to cure disease without the necessity of lifelong medication. For example, CAR-T cell therapy provided by Novartis against cancer is priced at $500.000 per patient. While I fully understand the pharmaceutical business model, I would hope to see pharmaceutical companies and biotechnology/bioengineering companies to work in parallel to find the best cure for individual patients with serious illnesses at a reasonable price. But I think this would also need a policy change in the way that health care is being financed, and as everyone knows this is another highly challenging proposition.

Enabling greater healthcare access is vital for equality in a broader society. The G20 themes address several crucial issues in order to strengthen the global health architecture, under the theme “Recover Together, Recover Stronger.” How does TissueMatcher’s platform fit into this?

I think it is obvious that facilitating and matching individual biological data on a global scale would enhance the access of patients to potentially lifesaving treatments such as stem cell or organ transplantation. In the end it’s a numbers game, the more people are included in a database, the more chance there is to find a matching donor. It would also enhance global knowledge on transplantation related issues, for example it may turn out that certain biological profiles that are not currently known provide better matches than others, which would make it easier to find a suitable match

The big pharma industry has to deal with many issues. To name a few: supply chain disruptions, marketing restrictions, the cost effectiveness of treatments, data disclosure, validation of clinical study design and reimbursement, and issues related to vaccines. Tissuematcher is building its own network of specialists. How do you prevent the traps that big pharma makes and the issues they have? To put it another way, how does TissueMatcher advance research while also giving the health-conscious consumer more control? 

In my opinion, the pharmaceutical industry puts itself first in line when making decisions on its business models. The patient comes into view later down the line (I would not say last but definitely not first), the problem is that once a problem arises within the industry itself, such as unavailability of medication or contamination of drugs at a manufacturing plant, the first victims are the patients. Pharmaceutical firms have the options to price in such failures hence in the end, patients pay for calamities with their own health, and society at large pays for it out of their own pockets.

In the case of TissueMatcher, the patients come first since the patient provides the data and decides what he or she wants to do with it (eg. to be a stem cell donor, an organ donor, or other). Plus the platform is completely cloud based, and patients can decide for themselves whether and where they would like to undergo any treatment based on their matching biological profiles. TissueMatcher will need to identify centers of expertise and will support a redundant network with little chance of disruption.

HLA has evolved over thousands of years, while passports are an invention of the last 100 years, so yes, HLA is intrinsically more valuable than a passport or an SSN. 

Dr. Hugo Sondermeyer

Although there are rising costs and economic uncertainty—for instance, the fintech bubble has burst—the proposition of many companies in big pharma and big tech remains acquiring and selling data over the heads of digital consumers. They have little or no control over their digital fingerprints and receive no monetary compensation for their data. What is your standpoint on this?

I have always found it odd that people would be willing to share their personal information for free, although I am guilty as charged. It would make more sense to at least offer some compensation, which could be covered by advertising revenues. In the case of even more powerful data such as biological profiles, participants should at least receive some form of compensation if they would like. But of course the ultimate reward for patients participating in a matching program for stem cells and organs would be the finding of a suitable donor.

TissueMatcher will soon digitally enable consumers to help each other by sharing HLA profiles in a secure blockchain solution. Could you also say that an HLA profile is as important as a passport or social security number for personal use?

In my opinion, an HLA profile is even more important than a passport, since it will never expire and has direct medical implications. Both healthy people (for example as stem cell donors) as well as patients benefit from HLA profiles being documented and searchable on a global scale. Plus the blockchain solution will provide the necessary privacy safeguards. HLA has evolved over thousands of years, while passports are an invention of the last 100 years, so yes, HLA is intrinsically more valuable than a passport or an SSN. 

Finally, what is it like to work with an enthusiastic international team of medical specialists and entrepreneurs?

It is awesome to work with both medical and non-medical people who believe in something good without having to deal with hierarchy or “office politics”. Health care and basic science research are ultimately necessary, but I have a feeling that these fields have become contaminated by too many interests which has taken the focus on the ultimate goal of advancing society as a whole. Our goals are clear in that we are implementing a system that will benefit global society in a major way. Since I worked on multiple continents I am also very excited to connect people on an international scale, plus in talking to (lay)people about TissueMatcher, I received unequivocally positive feedback, which is another incentive to keep pushing for more. It was my pleasure to answer your questions.

Hugo, thank you for this interview.
Team communications Tissuematcher