Two Doors,
Opened in Basel.

I went to Basel to speak. I came home with two new programs, and with the reminder that the best ideas usually arrive in someone else's sentence.

My talk was called What the Biology Can't Fix. It was about the things that have to be right before the science even gets its chance: giving research its own clock, learning from curing our companion animals, and choosing the capital structure before the science. It ended with a question for the room: profit and patents, or open collaboration? Several people asked for the slides afterwards, so here they are. This note is part of my answer. The story of slide four, and the show of hands it got, has a note of its own.

PDF · 10 slides What the Biology Can't Fix Festival of Biologics · Basel · October 2026

The first door.

The Festival of Biologics is a busy place: talks, stands, coffee in paper cups, and far more conversations than a few days should hold. In one of them, a man who is opening a new wet-lab accelerator in Basel early next year asked me a simple question. Could he introduce BioFund to the teams in his building?

It was not a question about money. His teams will have benches and mentors and a good address. What they often lack is a partner willing to share its experience instead of keeping it behind closed doors, to open up its own technology platforms, and to stay for the long run.

He was not asking us for anything. He wanted to offer his scientists something.

That is how Platform Partners began. Research institutions, incubators and accelerators open BioFund's technology platforms to their scientists and founders: today biodeep and UFP500°, with more in preparation. There is no fee for the partner and no exclusivity. For the teams, costs are modest and recurring instead of large and up front. We are starting in Zürich and Basel, where doors are already open.

The second door.

The second idea arrived more quietly. After many meetings, I noticed that the conversations I enjoyed most had nothing to do with deals. They were with young scientists who had a good idea and a hundred questions. Patent or publish? Who to call first? Is this a company yet, or still a paper?

I realized how much I had missed mentoring. Somewhere along the way it had slipped out of my calendar, while I was busy building BioFund into what it is today. Now the capabilities and the capacity are built into its core, and we can support the very first steps, where others are too shy to help.

First Light is how we put it back. It is pro-bono mentoring for scientists and founders at the very beginning, from the first idea to the first company, with no fees, no equity and no obligation. Some teams may later be invited to talk about investment with BioFund or Friends of BioFund. That will always be a separate conversation, and never the price of the first one.

Why the beginning.

Because that is where the most important decisions are made with the least help. A young team decides what to patent and what to publish, which partner to trust and which money to take, often in the same month and usually alone. Those early choices shape everything that follows, and they are very hard to undo.

The beginning is also where good science is most fragile. An idea can fade simply because a team could not get the protein it needed, or because the only advice it heard came with a price tag attached.

In Two Clocks we wrote that research runs on a long clock and development on a short one. Early teams feel both at once: the patience their science needs, and a runway measured in months. A no-exit family office can stand beside them without a stopwatch. That may be the most useful thing we have to give.

Both programs grow from ideas we have written down before: The Flywheel, Patent to Free, Not to Fence, and Der Leuchtturm, with its plea to share ideas while they are still half-baked. This note is one of those ideas. Platform Partners opens our platforms. First Light opens our experience.

Basel gave us two doors. Our work now is to keep them open.

Somewhere behind them is a young scientist with an idea that matters. If we help even a few of them through the first, hardest years, some of that work may one day help us cure and prevent cancer together.