Meet the LifeScience ORG CEO

Dominik Schumacher - Tubulis GmbH

What is your personal story of how you ended up in the life sciences?

Everyone in my family is in the life sciences, my parents and my two sisters. My father was an entrepreneur, so from an early age, I started thinking about the type of businesses I could create. 

I had my first business idea around the age of 14, which was to automate prescriptions. In Germany, the whole process of receiving a prescription from the doctor and taking it to the pharmacy to receive your medicine is very complicated. I started talking to pharmacists and doctors but everyone rebuffed me. They told me that most of their patients were too old. It would be too complicated and I was wasting my time.

Having this idea shot down by everyone made me afraid and I didn't go on. Now we are very close to having this type of automation in Germany, and that was my first business idea. It showed me never to give up. 

I then built websites for different people. At the time, it was a complicated process and there was quite some money in it. But then website builders, [such as WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix] were founded, and it became easy for the general public to make their own websites. When I stopped making money from that, I studied business and chemistry.  

My wish to become a life science entrepreneur was born of my father who, as I already mentioned, was an entrepreneur himself. So I was already very aware of the ups and downs – including the super-highs and super-lows – that come with building a company. 

I started looking for exciting, translatable projects all over Europe. In the end, I found a project in Berlin and Munich, which was supported by the German Research Foundation, DFG. During the project, I met the perfect sparring partner and an incredibly talented scientist and team builder, Jonas Helmer-Smets – our co-founder and CSO – and we started working on the technology Tubulis is based on. That’s how our company was born. 

So even though you knew that this entrepreneurial path would be very challenging, you decided to go for it?  

A little bit of naivety helped. But it’s also very rewarding. We developed a technology from scratch and now we have the opportunity to translate it into meaningful therapeutics for patients. The other great thing about building a company is the team. I have the opportunity to work with really committed, very talented people.