In 2011, I was in Tanzania with my family and we came across a snakebite clinic where two children had had amputations, one at the elbow, the other at the knee. That left a strong impression. I knew snakebite was a serious medical emergency, but had wrongly assumed that antivenoms, which have been around for almost 130 years, would have been available. I was amazed to discover that antivenoms are still being manufactured by immunizing horses and extracting their serum, rather than by using monoclonal antibodies.
The university "spin-in", as he terms it, happened because, despite there being a clear clinical and societal need for the products, it would have been hard for the company to deliver a financial return on investments. Laustsen-Kiel has now co-founded eight companies in total.
Biosyntia manufactures vitamins and other dietary ingredients using microbial fermentation. In 2013, Laustsen-Kiel co-founded VenomAb, which aimed to develop the world's first recombinant antivenom against snakebites. The company closed four years later, but its work lives on as a DTU research project, led by Laustsen-Kiel and funded by Wellcome in London.
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