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“You have to find partners you see eye-to-eye with and that will accompany you throughout the process"

Inbiomotion, a spin-off of IRB Barcelona and ICREA, is a personalized medicine company created in 2011 based on research conducted at the IRB Barcelona Growth control and cancer metastasis laboratory, led by Roger Gomís.

24.11.2016

Roger Gomis

Founder and non-executive director of Inbiomotion and ICREA researcher at IRB Barcelona

Roger holds a degree in Biochemistry and Business and his research focus on cancer metastasis. He got his PhD in Biochemistry (UB) in 2002 and was a postdoc fellow in professor Massagué’s laboratory at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Since 2006, he is head of the "Growth control and cancer metastasis" laboratory at IRB Barcelona.

Roger wanted to bring his research to cancer patients to improve their quality of life, so he combined his science and business training to create Inbiomotion with the aim of developing biomarkers to predict future bone metastases from biopsies of primary tumors.

The company has received support from the Ysios Capital venture capital fund and Fundació Vila Casas since 2012 and in 2016 closed its second round of funding, attracting €2.2 millions thanks to the majority stake taken by Caixa Capital Risc – investing through its Caixa Innvierte BioMed II fund – and Ysios Capital – through its Ysios BioFund.

Why did you want to be an entrepreneur?

I had the perfect background: training in science and business. This knowledge helped me understand how the system and technology transfer work. When I realized the research we were doing had potential for being applied to patients, I knew that if I wanted it to happen I would have to be the one to do it. To apply our model, the investement of resources was needed and this application would've been lost if I hadn't created Inbiomotion.

What is the most important strategic decision you’ve made so far?

I've made a lot of decisions over the years but the most important was surely looking for partners I see eye-to-eye with and that would accompany me throughout the process of setting up the company. Right now, we have different types of people working at Inbiomotion, from someone supervising product development to a pathologist.

What is the best advice you’ve ever been given?

I think the best advice I've ever been given was from a friend who's a business expert: if you're going to go into business, do it for real. That led me to seek Venture Capital and launch rounds of funding to be able to move forward with the project.

And now what? What milestones do you want to achieve in the short term?

In conceptual terms, we want to validate the clinical utility of our diagnostic kit. In business terms, we want to generate enough know-how, enough value, to allow Inbiomotion to be absorbed by a large company.

With that, we also want to prove that research done in the laboratory can be successfully taken to market and have a direct impact on patients' quality of life.