The Amphera Story, Beginning With The End In Mind: Rob Meijer on Building a Cell Therapy Company from Scratch
Why This Session Matters
The story Rob tells is about what it takes to turn a splendid academic invention from Erasmus MC into a promising cell therapy bridgehead. Rob summarises his main recommendation for therapy developers with a reference to Stephen Covey: “Begin with the end in mind”.
In Amphera’s case, the overarching mission from its inception is to obtain EMA and FDA marketing authorisation for MesoPher in order to be able to treat patients worldwide and as soon possible. Based on this mission, all choices about regulatory engagement, CMC investment, financing and team structure followed. If you must decide on how to prioritise limited resources, backward planning from a clear endpoint is an important lesson he wants to emphasise.
He pairs this with a more pragmatic encouragement as well: “Just go out and do it”. “Cell therapy is considered by many as very complicated. But to us, cell therapy is our core business. It is what we do. So, if you are convinced about your idea, listen to all the nay-sayers, adjust your plans where appropriate and give it a go!” The company’s trajectory from a start with no capital to its current status, illustrates what can be built around a promising treatment concept, an expert team, a deliberate registration strategy and a lot of stamina.
About Rob Meijer
After his studies (Industrial Engineering & Management – University of Twente) Rob worked several years for Hoechst, then moved into consulting at Coopers & Lybrand, later continuing as an independent consultant. Based on a business plan Rob drafted as a consultant, Mrs Ilona Enninga PhD founded Amphera in December 2012. Soon after Rob decided to join Amphera.
About Amphera
Amphera was built around a specific immunological premise. In many solid tumors, dendritic cells lose their ability to present antigens effectively, weakening the adaptive immune response. The company’s therapy, MesoPher, is based on harvesting a patient’s monocytes, differentiating them ex vivo into dendritic cells under GMP conditions, loading them with tumor-associated antigens derived from allogeneic mesothelioma cell lines, and reinfusing them to reactivate tumor-directed immunity.
The approach evolved from earlier work at Erasmus Medical Center that used autologous tumor lysate. The shift to immortalized allogeneic tumor cell lines was intended to solve both practical and immunological challenges.
Amphera
2012
Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Autologous dendritic cells with allogeneic lysate
