Alexandra Bause sometimes has to listen to this question from old colleagues: “Are you doing skin cosmetics now?” And she doesn’t like that at all. Because the 37-year-old doesn’t want to know anything about fighting wrinkles. Bause is co-founder of Apollo Health Ventures, the venture capital fund based in Berlin and Boston. He invests in start-ups on both sides of the Atlantic that want to fight the natural aging process.
“It has nothing to do with aesthetics,” explains the pharmacist. “We have the vision that we use drugs preventively so that certain diseases do not even appear.” So it is about those that appear in the first place as a result of the aging process. This also includes cancer and autoimmune diseases.
Bause and her colleagues are particularly interested in the personalized approach, in which people are treated differently depending on the diagnosis. “Thanks to scientific progress, it is already possible to identify potential risks for many people based on their genetics in combination with other measurable parameters and to recommend targeted interventions that help to optimize or restore their state of health,” explains Bause. “The mission of our fund is to develop the interventions for such a personalized and preventive health management.”
The first time she heard about “Age Research” was during a lunch talk at the Cancer Research Center in Tucson, Arizona, where she spent six months of her practical year. At that time it wasn’t an issue in Germany – but Bause hasn’t let go of it since then. She has her license as a pharmacist and also worked for a short time in the “Hirsch Apotheke” in Frankfurt. But she didn’t want to stay there and put a PhD from Harvard on it.
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There she deepened her knowledge of mitochondria, those “energy power plants of cells”, about which she can enthusiastically tell. But at that time Bause also got an insight into a completely different world, which she had not been able to use during her German pharmacy studies: “I heard about entrepreneurship and venture capital for the first time in Boston,” she says.
While she was still doing her PhD at Harvard, she attended meet-ups and career workshops at MIT, which is just a mile away. “In Germany they only explained to us how to set up a pharmacy,” she recalls.
Investments in San Francisco, Utrecht or Berlin
After two years as a consultant at Boston Consulting, she finally co-founded her own venture capital fund together with Nils Regge in 2016. The investments range from Aeovian Pharmaceuticals in San Francisco to Cleara in Utrecht and Ocher Bio in Oxford to Refoxy in Berlin. Apollo Health Ventures invests between $ 500,000 and $ 1 million per company, sometimes more. Apollo is often also a co-founder. “We invest in the early stages because we want to have a say in the strategy,” explains Bause. “We want to get the start-ups on the right track so that they can get there faster.”
It often takes many years for biotech companies to actually generate sales. In contrast to many Internet or technology companies, new therapies first have to be tested and approved in years of clinical tests. But that doesn’t mean investors can’t see money ahead of time. “The pharmaceutical companies often buy biotech start-ups before they even begin clinical tests,” explains Bause. Then the result is not yet certain, but the companies are still affordable.
Bause likes to say that she originally studied pharmacy because she had an aunt with a severe autoimmune disease and her parents pushed her into the medical direction so that she could “help the aunt”. Does she feel that she can also help as a venture capitalist? “Definitely. And maybe more than in medicine, where you can only use what is already there, ”she says. “On the other hand, we can have a say in where the research goes.”
Theranos scam could happen again today
Sometimes in the biotech hype, investors’ money goes to the wrong start-ups, as the Theranos case has shown. The blood analysis company was exposed as a huge scam. “Something like that could happen again today, especially when famous investors are on board,” Bause is convinced.
But she also believes that proper verification is possible in biotechnology. Your professional background helps you yourself. He also helps her as one of the few women in the venture capital industry: “As a scientist, I can talk to other scientists differently. They respect me more. “
More: The hurdles for the German biotech industry