Kinga Matuła

Six Questions for Kinga Matuła, PhD, CEO and Co-Founder of QurieGen in the Netherlands

From an early age, Kinga had a keen interest in chemistry and biology influenced by her mother’s work in hospitals, which led to Engineering and Master’s degrees in Biotechnology, Chemical and Process Engineering and later a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the Polish Academy of Sciences. This intersected with an interest in technology commercialization, resulting in business training from various programs in the US and EU and appointment as an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Scope Discovery venture studio in Warsaw, as well as being a cancer patient herself leading to the focus of her commercial biotechnology work that resulted in the formation of QuerieGen in 2022.

1. What problem is QurieGen solving and how?

Bringing an oncological drug to market is notoriously lengthy, costly, and unpredictable. The current process spans 10-15 years and costs €1.5-2 billion, with a staggering 95-97% of drug candidates failing during clinical trials. This high failure rate leads to patients often receiving treatments that don’t work or are harmful, and billions of dollars are wasted as a result. The pharmaceutical industry desperately needs a way to reduce risks and accelerate drug development to create targeted, effective therapies more efficiently and with fewer side effects. QurieGen pioneers a platform that combines a high-throughput proprietary, multi-omic method of mapping cellular responses to create predictive models of disease biology and drug responses that derisks and accelerates drug development.

2. What is your background that led you to co-founding QurieGen?

Growing up, my desire to help patients was profoundly influenced by my mother’s work in the hospital. I remember playing with my sister Iza, pretending to perform surgeries and dreaming of becoming a doctor (even though, amusingly, I would often end up stabbing myself with needles and scalpels, all while being squeamish around blood!). By the time I was six, I realized that a doctor’s reach was limited to the number of patients they could personally care for. The idea of improving treatments, developing new drugs, or coming up with innovative diagnostic methods was incredibly exciting to me. It felt like a chance to make a real difference in the lives of thousands, or even millions, of people, which was far more fulfilling than just helping a few patients directly.

This passion for finding better solutions for those in need has driven me every day and led me to pursue a career as a scientist. My experience as an oncological patient in 2018 profoundly reshaped my view on life and deepened my commitment to advancing patient treatment and care.

Although I had spent time in hospitals before, my own experience in the oncology department was truly eye-opening. This personal journey, coupled with my background in chemical engineering, biotechnology, physical chemistry, and genetics, has fueled my mission to bridge the gap between the lab bench and the bedside. At QurieGen, I’m dedicated to accelerating drug development and delivering more effective treatments to patients, faster and better.

3. What is unique about your technology and what is its validation status?

First, we are looking at reactions at the single cell level, cell-by-cell, and also across the complete time span of reaction, like a time-lapse assessment of each cell, whereas previous methods were like watching the beginning of a movie and then the end and having to infer what happened in between. Single-cell sequencing technologies are relatively new in biology, only emerging about 7-8 years ago in the late 20-teens. This was also when more powerful AI was emerging into practice, so we are combining two of the very latest breakthroughs in biotech analytics.

Second, and very fortunately, we did not just whip this up and then try to hustle it. We were approached by a big pharmaceutical company that knew our research group was pioneering these methods and they asked us to solve a problem they had, so in a way what became QurieGen was somewhat self-validated because we were developing a solution wanted by a customer.

So, our platform QuRIE-seq™, quantifies cellular responses to different drug molecules and disease patterns at a high-resolution by combining single-cell genomics, quantification of full transcriptome and hundreds of membrane and intracellular proteins with the deep learning techniques of AI to build predictive models that provide unique insights into how diseased cells respond to drugs, so as to narrow down and de-risk candidates in-silico much faster than clinical trials. Our brand name .”QuRIE” is actually an acronym for Quantification of RNA and Intracellular Epitope as well as being inspired by my Polish heritage, as “Qurie” echoes “Curie” (the name of Maria Skłodowska-Curie, the Polish Nobel Prize winner) So, beyond the initial bespoke version, the broader platform has been validated through collaborations with Aduro Biotech, J&J and Acerta Pharma (group of AstraZeneca) and some of them published.

4. What are your Go-To-Market ideas and traction received so far?

We see ourselves as support to pharmaceutical companies, so we’re focusing first on B2B or B2Pharma services as a Contract Research Organization, with the goal of evolving into a full-fledged pharmatech company, leveraging our proprietary technology in paid discovery partnerships. As we progress, we will evolve into end-to-end collaborative drug development of innovative treatments, powered by our proprietary database AI/ML and analytics. As noted above, we’ve collaborated and published with major pharma companies validating the groundbreaking potential of our platform.

5.  What is next?

We are currently busy closing our funding round, expanding the team, and focusing on acquiring new pharma clients. Our pre-seed round financing will enable us to take things to the next level; speeding up our data generation, building our proprietary database, developing further ML algorithms and entering the open market. We are thrilled about building an amazing company with the new people we will bring on board.

6. Tell us about your experience with XTC.

Participating in the Extreme Tech Challenge (XTC) at TNW was a game-changer for QurieGen! XTC provided us with top-notch support and expert guidance that took our pitch to the next level and connected us with key investors. Being a finalist was a thrilling experience, giving us the chance to showcase our innovation on a major stage. XTC’s global vision was a perfect match for our ambitions, immersing us in a dynamic international network. Meeting inspiring founders and engaging with the incredible XTC team made this journey both professionally exhilarating and personally rewarding. I can’t recommend this program enough!