“I wanted to do something that would make a positive impact”

Madurga Alonso admits that one of the hardest parts about competing for the award was giving her presentation in French. But thanks to a lot of practice – and certain that her efforts would be worth it – Madurga Alonso pulled it off and came home a winner. The Isabelle Musy award is given out every two years to a female entrepreneur in science and technology from the French- or Italian-speaking part of Switzerland who is working to make a positive societal impact. This year’s award ceremony was held this past Thursday as part of the 2023 Startup Champions Seed Night at the Rolex Forum.

Madurga Alonso has developed the first curative treatment for cardiac fibrosis, a disease that can develop after heart injury (due to a heart attack or high blood pressure, for example) and that impairs heart function dramatically as the fibrosis progresses. There’s currently no curative treatment for cardiac fibrosis, meaning it can lead to heart failure and even death. But Madurga Alonso and her colleague Mathieu Girardin – who is also finishing up his PhD at the EPFL lab headed by Prof. Joerg Huelsken, an expert in cancer research – have set out to change that with a novel immunotherapy-based treatment. Their technology uses a specific type of immune cell – natural killer (NK) cells – that have been equipped with chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) in order to attack aberrant cardiac cells. CARs are synthetic receptors that grant immune cells supra-physiological properties enabling them to eliminate any target cell expressing a selected marker. They were initially developed for use with T cells in the treatment of cancer, and this method has demonstrated high efficacy for certain types of blood cancer. However, CAR T cell therapies are complicated to implement and come with some side effects.

Creative and curious by nature

Recent studies on NK cell-based immunotherapy have found that these cells offer a promising alternative without many of the drawbacks of T cells. To test the potential of NK cell therapies, Madurga Alonso and Girardin added CAR constructs to NK cells and ran both in vitro and in vivo tests. They discovered that their approach has a high success rate against various types of cancer cells. But rather than cancer, the PhD students decided to target their technology to cardiac fibrosis – a disease that affects over half a million people worldwide every year – given the low competition in the cardiac fibrosis market. They adapted their CAR NK cells to target activated fibroblasts, which are the driver of disease progression. This method proved to be effective in vitro. The plan is to use CAR NK cells in a single-dose treatment that can halt fibrosis and prevent it from progressing to a fatal stage. Alonso and Girardin filed a patent application for their technology in January 2023 with the help of EPFL’s Technology Transfer Office.

Madurga Alonso, who’s both creative and curious by nature, has always wanted to do two things: pursue a career she enjoys and make a positive impact. She liked drawing as a child but didn’t want to make it her livelihood, for fear that it would be too limiting. She instead opted for science – a subject that fueled her curiosity and offered the possibility of discovering something new. Madurga Alonso later decided to specialize in immunology, as it has many topics still waiting to be explored with potential applications in human health. The dynamic and (relatively) fast pace of immunotherapy research is what clinched her decision.

The problem is that most things created in a research lab end up staying there.

While completing her Bachelor’s degree in biotechnology at the University of Barcelona, Madurga Alonso went to Zurich as part of the Erasmus exchange program – leaving behind her native Spain along with her parents, brother and five sisters. She then obtained a Master’s degree from ETH Zurich’s Basel campus and did an internship at a nearby immunotherapy startup for several months. “The internship is where I found out about immunotherapy, and I decided to study it further for my PhD,” she says. She enrolled in a PhD program at EPFL, where she’s also working with Girardin to develop and test their CAR NK cell therapy. “It takes up a lot of time alongside my thesis work. That’s why I’ve extended my PhD as long as possible – to nearly six years,” says Madurga Alonso, who recently turned 30. She’ll soon be defending her thesis and has already laid the groundwork for her future career.

Her startup is housed at the La Forge incubator at EPFL Innovation Park, and she and Girardin are ready to begin trials in order to validate and characterize their therapy. “The problem is that most things created in a research lab end up staying there,” she says. “To avoid falling into that trap, we decided to create a business, patent our technology and start preclinical trials.”

For Madurga Alonso, this entails donning a new hat: that of an entrepreneur. “It’s intimidating, but also really exciting! Sometimes you have to get out of the lab, and it’s stimulating to see people from the outside get enthusiastic about an idea you’ve poured your time and energy into. I still don’t feel very comfortable presenting our technology – especially in French – but I’m working on it. It’s an invigorating challenge.” That made winning the Isabelle Musy award – along with its CHF 50,000 in prize money – all the sweeter. Especially since the award “is a competition, not a research funding program, so there’s generally only one winner. It’s not enough just to be good – you have to be better than the rest.”