Investor Partnerships

The Institut Pasteur has engaged with a wide range of investors who are leaders in life sciences including diagnostics, therapeutics, vaccines and technology. Our investors are involved, as co-development partners, at an early stage and all along the value chain. This strong collaboration speeds up product developability potential and ultimately leads to funding of downstream development of Institut Pasteur innovations either through maturation processes or by fostering the creation of startups.

Research Joint Lab
The Institut Pasteur actively strives to bridge the educational gap between academic and industrial scientists by creating Joint Research Labs and Industrial chairs. This brings together academic and industrial researchers, therefore maximizing opportunities to co-develop innovative ideas.

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Kurma Partners is a venture capital firm based in Paris and Munich that specializes in funding biopharma and digital diagnostics companies. Kurma Partners manages more than €400 million, a large part of which goes towards setting up companies based on innovative academic research.

"Our collaboration with the Institut Pasteur began when Kurma was first set up back in 2009, with a cooperation agreement to promote the industrial development of innovations from the Institut Pasteur's laboratories.

This cooperation continued when we launched our Kurma Diagnostics I fund (the first European fund specializing in digital diagnostics solutions) and Kurma Biofund III (in 2019).

In the coming years, we aim to prioritize the emergence of new companies spun off from the Institut Pasteur, while also encouraging our startups to develop further links with the Institut Pasteur's scientists.

Several ambitious startups have already been launched as a result of collaboration between the Institut Pasteur's scientists and Kurma's investors, including Cellectis, DNA Script, Pathoquest and KDx Acceleration.

What interests us with the Institut Pasteur is the remarkable capability for innovation demonstrated by its research teams, which have been at the forefront of many major discoveries in fields such as infection, immunology and molecular biology.

Our hope is that through our collaboration, we will help harness even more innovations from the Institut Pasteur's research and encourage the startup community to develop further links with the Institut Pasteur! "

Thierry Laugel, Rémi Droller and Vanessa Malier, Managing Partners of Kurma Partners

The main challenge for academics in the commercialization of important new discoveries is the technological development gap: the phase between inventions at an early stage and the stage that innovative technologies must reach to become viable and attractive candidates for licensing and commercialization.

For high risk/high value products or for products with low commercial profitability, it is often necessary nowadays to bring discoveries one step further to ensure their transfer to industry or to attract venture capitalists.

The newly created Development of Innovation Office seeks to bridge the gap to achieve this goal, which necessarily involves an industrialization process.

Eligo Bioscience, a next-generation microbiome precision medicine company, is pioneering the development of phage-derived DNA delivery vectors for microbial species involved in a number of disease areas, including infectious diseases, inflammatory diseases and auto-immune diseases.

Eligo Bioscience was set up in 2014 based on research from the Lu Lab (MIT, USA) and the Marraffini Lab (Rockefeller University, USA). Eligo was incubated at the Institut Pasteur in Paris from 2014 to 2017 and moved to the “Paris Biotech Santé” biotech cluster at Cochin Hospital in 2017.

David Bikard, Co-founder and CSO of Eligo Bioscience, is Head of the Synthetic Biology Lab at the Institut Pasteur.