Every company's journey is unique; what matters is what endures. Pierre d'Epenoux, who led ImCheck from a Marseille academic spinout to its acquisition by Ipsen, reflects on treating the exit as the mandate from the outset, keeping a large board aligned, understanding what makes pharma buy, and navigating a market that can turn overnight.

1. Building a biotech to an exit takes close to a decade. Looking back, what determined whether those years led somewhere?

Every company's timeline is unique, but in our field, the shape is fairly consistent, because you cannot compress the biology. It runs in sequence: preclinical work, then the clinic, then the data package a pharma partner will genuinely value. So, the length of the journey matters less than what sustains it over time. For us, that came down to four things that had to work together: strong data and intellectual property, a capable team, the ability to raise capital, and traction with pharma. For most scientific founders, the first two are within reach; it is capital and traction that tend to decide whether a company survives.

Much of it comes down to intent. When you accept investment, you accept a mandate, and it is ultimately a binary one: an IPO or an acquisition. It is easy to treat that as a distant concern, but it should inform your decisions from the first year. We tried to work backwards from the eventual exit throughout, choosing trials, senior hires and data readouts according to whether they moved us toward something a pharma company would want to own. The nine years were productive because we had a clear view, early, of what the final year would need to look like.

2. The data continually reshapes the plan. How did you decide what to build?

We worked to a rough balance of twenty percent strategy and eighty percent execution, and a big part of that strategy was having the discipline to stop programs. A sound strategy is not difficult to design; what is difficult is letting the data override your own plan promptly, especially the parts you are attached to. We began with two antibody programs, and within two years one had become too academic, so we closed it to concentrate on the asset that became ICT01. We advanced it in solid and liquid tumors in parallel and let the results guide where we invested; the AML program moved faster, so it received the resources. 

Focus is what makes a company fundable. The temptation is to keep every program alive and spread across many indications to appear ambitious, but that tends to make a company harder to finance, not easier. Once the direction is set, execution becomes largely a matter of process: the IND-enabling work, the trial design, the readouts. Ultimately, the market rewards that kind of focus when it is matched by disciplined, top-notch execution. Within roughly two weeks of presenting the AML data at ASCO in 2025, we had our first term sheets.

3. Aligning a large group of investors on a decision of this magnitude is difficult. How did you approach it?

Alignment cannot be created at the end of the journey. It is the product of something built steadily over years, and if it is not there when the moment arrives, it cannot be manufactured. For nine years I spoke with two or three of our investors on most days, never to lobby them and certainly not to set one against another, but the opposite: to keep a level of transparency that lets investors compare notes among themselves and find that what each has been told is consistent.

That consistency is what builds trust, and trust compounds without your involvement. By the time we were evaluating term sheets, the board was straightforward to align because there was little left to reconcile. Difficult news, delivered early and plainly, is what earns that trust in the first place; the instinct to defer or soften a hard message almost always costs more later than it saves at the time.

4. A senior executive departs at a critical point in a trial. How did you handle it?

In our experience, our Chief Medical Officer (CMO) had to leave to return to the US for understandable personal and family reasons, but it was at a delicate moment of our Phase I. Replacing a CMO is hard because the right person must fit several dimensions at once: the data, the ambition, the team, the investors and the management. Navigating that transition at a critical moment in our clinical studies was a tough experience, and finding the right person required time and patience.

The instinct is to hire quickly to close the gap, but that is precisely where the danger lies. An ill-fitting appointment at that stage is more damaging than a temporary vacancy. So we separated two problems that feel like one: continuity and the permanent decision. We kept the trial moving with an experienced consultant who saw us through dose selection, and gave ourselves the time, which ended up being nine months, to find the right permanent hire rather than the available one. The value of that patience became clear when we generated our first strong AML data only a month after the new CMO joined.

5. What does it genuinely take to reach an acquisition by pharma, and when does that work begin?

It begins years ahead, and it is more of a long relationship rather than a transaction. We appointed a US-based Chief Business Officer in 2019, well before any deal, specifically to put our data in front of pharma and to understand what they would need to see. Around fifteen oncology companies followed our progress, meeting us three or four times a year. The real value of that was in learning precisely what would justify an acquisition and then going and generating it.

Strong data is necessary but never sufficient. We had compelling data in 2024, and yet, it still took a year to reach a first term sheet, because pharma commits only when three things are true together: a fully validated target, a fully demonstrated mechanism of action, and clear clinical superiority over the standard of care. Any two of the three will not move them. Once we had assembled all three and presented them at AACR and ASCO, the term sheets followed. We engaged Centerview, and we could move quickly, largely because our data room had been ready for years rather than assembled under pressure. An exit that looks rapid from the outside is usually several years in the making.

6. After an acquisition, what does a large pharma actually retain, and what does that suggest founders should be building?

It is key to understand what a strategic acquirer is really buying, because it should shape what you build. In our case, more than ninety percent of the value lay in the lead clinical asset, which Ipsen is now advancing along the path we had set: the FDA agreement for a seamless Phase II/III trial and their own real-world data confirming what we had observed.

What founders tend to underestimate is that an acquisition is rarely just about a molecule or clinical asset. In our case, Ipsen was also acquiring our team and its immuno-oncology expertise, which it has deliberately preserved. Maturity matters too. Ipsen has been open about not pursuing discovery, but preferring assets that have reached a certain stage, so our earlier pipeline is being retained selectively, as potential next-generation candidates. If you are building toward a strategic exit, that is the level of maturity to build for, rather than the science you personally find most interesting.

7. If you were to offer one principle to a first-time founder in European healthcare, what would it be?

Build from the outside in rather than the inside out. The common instinct is the reverse: founders know their data better than anyone and spend their energy persuading investors and pharma that their own view is correct. That is the harder road, and often an unproductive one. It is more reliable to treat what investors and pharma tell you as the specification and to generate exactly that, while keeping your own plan and the flexibility to adapt.

This is also why the team matters as much as the science. I have seen strong science fail because the people around it could not listen, communicate or adapt. What you need is not the most brilliant scientist in the room, but people capable and secure enough to absorb disagreement and change course.

8. Markets can close with little warning. How did you get through it?

You have to assume the window can close abruptly, and act decisively when it does. At the end of 2020 we were prepared for a Nasdaq IPO, with strong banks and real momentum among US crossover funds. In the first quarter of 2021, the market fell sharply, and those funds effectively withdrew. The mistake in such a moment is to wait and hope that conditions will return. We allowed a single summer for it, and when nothing improved, we moved to a private round rather than holding on to the IPO.

Two things carried us through. One was that decisiveness. The other was raising more than we strictly needed: we had set out for €50 million and closed €96 million, at a time when very few biotech companies were raising at all; that is when Earlybird co-led the Series B. In a downturn, capital is not simply runway; it is the ability to keep executing while others are constrained. The industry moves in cycles, and much of survival is about not being forced to sell or shut down at the bottom of the cycle.