As the new CEO of LimmaTech Biologics, Haas’ IP and legal background sets him apart to lead the charge for the team’s bacterial vaccine pipeline.
Pictured: Franz-Werner Haas, CEO of LimmaTech Biologics/Nicole Bean for BioSpace
It’s endlessly challenging to explain to a young person how their decisions now may impact their future self. For Franz-Werner Haas, CEO of LimmaTech Biologics AG outside of Zurich, Switzerland, the push and pull between studying biology or law is precisely what brought him to his current role, he told BioSpace.
LimmaTech is a biotech with its sights set on vaccine development for a variety of bacterial diseases, from antimicrobial resistant (AMR) conditions to sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Haas joined the team in July 2023 after spending 11 years working his way up to the role of CEO at CureVac. LimmaTech recently licensed the Shigella vaccine candidate from GSK, and Haas said he is prepared to lead the charge on bringing that vaccine to market after his work on vaccine development throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Global Legal Training
Growing up in the small town of Bitburg, Germany, on the border with Luxembourg, Haas knew early that to follow his personal interests in law or medicine, he would have to relocate into the larger urban centers of Europe. The question then became what to study, as both fields required specific, regimented paths.
“I was always interested in life science,” Haas said. “What I was really interested in [was], how does a society work? A company work? It’s an organism as well.”
Haas said that vision of people as parts of a larger organism drove him to study international law, and eventually patent law, in institutions across Germany, Belgium and Scotland throughout the 1990s. The experience exposed him to practitioners who brought the theory of law out of obscurity and into practical, day-to-day applications.
But to this day, Haas said, he has mixed feelings about the decision not to study biology. There is only so much time to study so much information, he explained, and any decision to follow a single path means denying others that could be just as interesting or joyful. Eventually, he found a way to merge both of his interests.
COVID-19 Pandemic
After serving as an assistant to the management team in a private holding company, Haas found his entry into the biotech industry in 2002, focusing primarily on business and product development. Part of his role required getting so well-versed in the scientific backbone of projects that he could present the ideas and findings and ideas to stakeholders like investors. Over the years, Haas said he has felt more comfortable navigating the intersection between law and life sciences across operations in the biopharma industry, but the true test came in 2020.
At the time, he was working with CureVac, where he’d begun his tenure in 2012 as chief corporate officer. On March 13, 2020, not only did the world shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the CEO of CureVac, Ingmar Hoerr, suffered a brain aneurysm. The main investor on the supervisory board contacted Haas and alerted him that he was next in line to become acting CEO, he said. The catch was that the team had only a few months of cash on hand and was actively managing a billion-dollar project with 42,000 subjects already recruited—and no ability to travel due to the global shutdown.
“Looking backward, I would never have expected to end up in this situation,” he said. “I was not afraid, I have to say, because there was no time to be afraid; we had to just run.”
Under Haas’ leadership, the team hunkered down, raised money and filed for an IPO in the United States, generating funds needed to develop a COVID-19 vaccine in partnership with GSK. After a variety of bumps in the road due to continually changing variants, Haas found himself returning to investors and stakeholders continually with lessons learned—including from failures—to keep moving forward. While the vaccine did not win the race to market, it is still under development, with the company announcing in August that the first patient had been dosed in a Phase II trial.
Haas said the experience taught him that it’s possible to move forward, even from a defensive situation, recover after failure and take the larger lessons to heart to give investors confidence in new scientific research and developments—lessons he took with him to LimmaTech earlier this year.
As the world refocuses on health issues beyond COVID-19, one global health issue that is receiving much attention is antibiotic-resistant infections. For example, LimmaTech’s internal data on the STI gonorrhea shows that out of 700,000 U.S.-based gonorrhea infections, half are resistant to traditional antibiotics.
“If this trend continues, the disease may very well become untreatable by 2030,” Haas said.
The secret sauce that the team has its sights set on is finding and deploying highly conserved antigens. “By focusing on these antigens, we aim to counteract the natural immune evasion mechanisms employed by Neisseria gonorrhoeae,” Haas explained.
The LimmaTech team is also focused on developing a recently acquired vaccine candidate for Shigella, the central bacterium that creates shigellosis, a debilitating GI disease without any preventive medicine. Research from the team estimates that the disease results in 600,000 deaths around the globe on an annual basis.
If more conditions become resistant to antibiotics, that has the potential to reverse all of the gains made in global public health around the world, Haas said, and as the pandemic demonstrated, vaccines can have implications beyond medicine.
“[The role of vaccines] isn’t just about protecting individuals against infectious diseases, but to form a bulwark against broader socio-economic disruptions.”
Karen Fischer is a freelance science writer based in New Mexico. Reach her at kfischerwrites.com.
