Investors & Innovators × JLABS
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On Wednesday, May 13th, at Campus Biotech Geneva, BioAlps welcomed Elena Fernandez Kleinlein and Michael Huebner of Johnson & Johnson Innovation / JLABS for an afternoon of close-up encounters with some of the most promising neurotech and biotech ventures emerging from the Swiss Health Valley.
The visit followed a morning at Biopole in Lausanne and was part of a wider Swiss tour wrapped around the Swiss HLG Annual Conference and the kick-off of the 2026 Startup Initiative in Montreux. For JLABS — J&J’s incubator programme, which has supported more than 1,200 startups worldwide over the past decade — the brief was simple: open a direct line of dialogue between J&J’s external innovation team and the founders, scientists, and ecosystem builders shaping the next wave of life-sciences innovation in Switzerland.
The startups in the room
Four ventures took the floor at Campus Biotech, each tackling a fundamentally different problem in modern medicine:
- Antion Biosciences — Smart In Vivo Cell Programming. Antion’s proprietary mirGE™ technology enables simultaneous multiplex activation and silencing of gene targets, unlocking immune-evasive design and durable, multi-gene cellular reprogramming directly inside the body. Presented by Antonija Šakić.
- Adoram Therapeutics — AI-enabled allosteric drug discovery. A Swiss university spinoff, Adoram’s CamBio platform combines real-time allosteric screening with advanced AI for target prioritization, molecular design, and toxicity prediction — opening the door to best- and first-in-class allosteric modulators against GPCR targets long considered intractable. Presented by David Pejoski.
- Release Therapeutics — Living implants for sustained protein delivery. This Geneva-based startup turns implanted, encapsulated human cells into long-running biological factories: months to years of sustained therapy from a single biocompatible capsule. With proof of concept across murine, non-human primate, and Phase I oncology data, Release was recently awarded the 2026 Pfizer Prize for Biomedical Research. Presented by Nicolas Mach.
- Cancentus — Optimizing the therapeutic index in oncology. A UNIGE-born project now hosted at BaseLaunch, Cancentus is focused on the critical balance between treatment efficacy and patient safety — and is currently raising. Presented by Thanos Halazonetis.
An ecosystem at the same table
What made the afternoon work wasn’t just the science on the slides — it was who sat around the table. Tracy Laabs (Wyss Geneva), Wilma Lukas (FONGIT / Innosuisse), Raquel Rouco Garcia (Science Innovation Hub – UNIGE), and Raluca Flükiger (Unitec) brought the translational, financing, and tech-transfer perspective that keeps Geneva’s life-sciences engine running.
Looking ahead
It’s a reminder that what makes the region productive is not any single lab or accelerator, but the tight loop between research, translation, financing, and clinical know-how — all within a short walk of each other.
For an afternoon, BioAlps was proud to embrace once more its core mission: offer a space where world-class science meets the partners who can turn it into therapies. There’s real momentum here, serious engineering depth, and a generation of founders confident enough to pitch the world’s largest healthcare company on the work they’re doing in Geneva.
A warm thank-you to Elena and Michael for making the trip, and to the founders and ecosystem partners who showed up with their best work. We’re looking forward to where these conversations lead.