Two years after its launch, Hemerion Therapeutics inaugurated its new premises on Thursday, October 20. Located in Villeneuve d’Ascq in the North of France, Hemerion Headquarters houses the team in charge of the clinical development of its brain cancer therapy, as well as industrial prototyping and R&D facilities.
Launched in 2020 on the basis of scientific studies carried out by Inserm, the University of Lille and the Lille University Hospital, Hemerion has grown rapidly and moved to new premises, which were inaugurated in early October 2022.
The inauguration was an opportunity for the Hemerion team to bring together its clinical, scientific, regulatory and financial partners to review the company’s development.
A high point in Hemerion’s development praised by its partners
The inauguration was an opportunity for Hemerion’s financial, clinical, industrial and regulatory partners to share their perspectives on Hemerion’s development with an ambitious goal in sight: to launch phase II clinical trials at the international level to definitively validate the safety and efficacy of the treatment against glioblastoma.
- Laetitia Clabé, President of the patient association “Des étoiles dans la mer”, emphasized the need to give hope to patients suffering from glioblastoma, the most aggressive brain cancer, which affects 25,000 more people each year.
- Prof. Nicolas Reyns, neurosurgeon and co-founder of Hemerion, shared his experience as a practitioner and highlighted the challenges posed to surgeons by this very aggressive cancer. He also recalled Hemerion’s objective: to offer neurosurgeons a complementary and easy-to-use technology and to significantly improve clinical results by destroying cancer cells that escape conventional surgical treatment with light.
- Daniel Leca, Vice-President of the Hauts-de-France Regional Council in charge of Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Europe, reminded the audience of the consequences of cancer in the region and emphasized the support that the Regional Council provides to research teams to advance treatments.
- Etienne Vervaecke, Managing Director of Eurasanté, explained the importance of the continuous support of research and innovation to help companies emerge, which, like Hemerion, are able to develop and deploy new treatments against cancer.
- Franck Mouthon, President of France Biotech, took the floor to highlight the role played by healthtech start-ups in therapeutic innovation and the international deployment of new treatments.
- Samir Ould-Ali, Regional Delegate for INSERM, spoke about the scientific and clinical genesis of the Hemerion project and the fundamental role of public research in therapeutic innovation. Fabrice Lefebvre, President of SATT Nord, illustrated the technology transfer process, which is essential to develop a technology at the clinical level.
- Finally, Frédéric Boiron, General Director of the Lille University Hospital, highlighted the clinical progress already made by Hemerion, which bodes well for full clinical validation in the coming years.
Hemerion’s premises: from clinical expertise to industrial prototyping
Hemerion’s premises house both the office space dedicated to the implementation of clinical trials and the laser prototyping laboratories necessary to perfect the technology and extend it to the treatment of other cancers.