Inspiring Journey of Luc Henry and Yann Pierson Through Limula

How Luc Henry and Yann Pierson converted an issue into an opportunity and made their entrepreneurial journey successful through Limula?

About Luc Henry and Yann Pierson

Meet Limula's co-founder and CEO, Luc Henry. With a DPhil (PhD) in Chemical Biology from the University of Oxford, Luc is a highly accomplished scientist with a solid theoretical and practical foundation in chemistry, biotechnology, and immunology. This multi-talented businessman builds profitable ventures by combining his analytical, interpersonal, and communication skills. Before Limula, he was EPFL President Martin Vetterli's personal advisor.

Yann Pierson is Limula's CTO and co-founder. Since childhood, he has been passionate about science.  Growing up, he learned the value of the sciences in chemistry, biology, programming, and engineering then applied them to a variety of projects.

Oxford University is where they first met. Each of them was aware of several startup environments. Yann observed an issue and decided to address that problem with Luc. Even to support Yann, Luc left his job. This is how they started their entrepreneurial journey.

What issue led them into entrepreneurship?

Yann noticed an issue and came up with a fix. Then he spoke with Luc about his interest in making this solution into a business. Furthermore, Luc left his job to assist Yann in structuring the project, assembling a team, and carrying out all necessary tasks to advance his invention.

They observed a global scarcity of manufacturing capacity for highly customized cancer therapies known as CGTs (Cell and Gene Therapies).

Cell-based cancer therapies such as CAR T represent a revolution in personalized medicine, which has the potential to save the lives of over 2 million cancer patients each year. Although some are currently available, only a very small number of patients are able to benefit from their life-saving qualities due to their complexity and high production cost. They wanted to offer a technological platform to help with their large-scale manufacturing. That's why Luc and Yann launched their start-up, Limula, in 2020.

What does Limula do?

Limula, based in Switzerland, was an innovative solution for producing the most personalized cancer treatments on demand. This innovative technology platform combines end-to-end automation and integrated process analytics to complete several stages of cell therapy manufacturing on a single device.

The company's mission is to provide the most personalized cancer treatments to patients in need, regardless of their location, at a reasonable cost. In order to achieve this goal, Limula offers a special technique for automating the large-scale production of CAR T-cell therapies.

This is how Luc and Yann, observed an issue and converted that into an opportunity and became a successful entrepreneurs building multi-million worth company.