Michael Engsig, CEO, Nykode Therapeutics about NLSDays’  Vaccine Crosslinks: From Cancer to COVID super session interviewed by Chelsea Ranger, Senior advisor, SwedenBIO Norway is certainly proud of Nykode – formerly Vaccibody – and the company’s journey has been exciting. Can you share a bit about the journey to the Nykode of today and what we can expect moving forward? Indeed, it has been an exciting journey for Nykode over the last couple of years. We are currently in the middle of a transformative journey from a two-asset focused, small biotech company into a full-fledged technology platform biotech entirely focused on exploiting our unique immunotherapy platform. It’s a long and intensive path requiring a lot of hard work, but also with very rewarding moments. Especially, when we experience that the work could indeed provide meaningful differences for patients down the road. Our intention going forward is to maintain a dual focus, first on bringing our programs forward through the development phases and closer to the patients, and second on improving our platform to yield even better next generations of products. That may also mean expanding into even more new therapeutic areas. This year’s NLSDays is focused on “Powering-up Through Partnerships.” Nykode is certainly aligned with this and your company has stated that partnering is the catalyst for innovation and foundation for commercial success. Can you tell us about this? The third element in our strategy, in addition to focusing on project progress and platform improvements, is to accelerate the development of the company, projects and technology through partnerships. We believe in the power of employing partnerships to complement our own core strengths, whether by bringing competencies, resources, or finances. Each of our three major partnerships have helped us accelerate our strategy and this will remain a pivotal element in our partnering strategy going forward when selecting what to partner and with whom. In addition to the tangible objectives of our partnerships, we also realized that, just by entering a collaboration with a external partner adds to growing our internal organisational competencies. So, we are big fans of going for synergies by way of partnering. What advice would you offer the many startup teams that now look to Nykode as a role model? Stay curious and open-minded. Many of the partners we work with today, not just traditional partnerships but also with vendors and service providers, are based on relationships created on this type of partnering conferences. So I advise my early stage colleagues to really meet as many people as possible and stay very open-minded in terms of who to talk with. In every conversation, there is a potential partnership, maybe tomorrow, next year, or five years down the road. And every conversation is a chance to learn just a little bit of new information. Thank you so much Michaël and see you in Malmö! Super Session 3 28 September 2022 Vaccine Crosslinks: From Cancer to COVID