Meet the nextGEN
Christian Kersten - AKIGAI
What is your personal story of how you ended up in the life sciences?
I'm an oncologist by training and have enjoyed working as a physician and researcher for more than 20 years. I like building bridges and enjoy translational research from bench to bedside. I have built up clinical trial units and have been involved in more than 50 clinical trials. I always had an interest in going into biotech but due to family reasons and where I was located in Norway that was not possible.
Then, roughly 15 years ago, something life-changing happened. I had a patient with a rectal cancer recurrence in his pelvis which was affecting his sciatic nerve. This meant that he was in terrible neuropathic pain. For three years, he was in so much pain that he became wheelchair-dependent. Back then, there was a class of new cancer drugs called EGFR inhibitors that included an antibody against the EGF receptor. I gave him the treatment against his cancer and within a few hours, the patient was pain-free.
When he came back to me three weeks later for the next treatment cycle, I asked him how he was. This was a 63-year-old engineer, who was quite a matter-of-fact type of man. But he stood up from his chair, walked through the room, turned around, and was crying. He told me he was pain-free for the first time in three years.
At the time, I didn’t think much about it. As his oncologist, I was mostly interested in treating his cancer. So I continued the therapy. But when the cancer progressed, I stopped treating him with the EGFR inhibitor, and his incredible pain returned. That’s when I realized that maybe the EGFR inhibitor had something to do with the pain relief, and I decided to treat his neuropathic pain with the EGFR inhibitor again. The patient became pain-free again.
My colleague and co-founder Marte Cameron with whom I shared patients back then, said: “This is important. We have to follow up on that.”
We found that the EGFR pathway, which is known to be active in cancer, also played a role in neuropathic pain. After discovering this, we patented the use of EGFR inhibitors against neuropathic pain.
We began treating more patients with neuropathic pain. To date, we have treated more than 100 patients successfully with six different EGFR inhibitors for 11 different neuropathic pain indications, including shingles, sciatica, postoperative pain, complex regional pain syndrome, and phantom limb pain. It works in roughly 70% of the patients within hours. It’s like an on-and-off switch.
Back then, we thought the fastest way to get this treatment to patients was to out-license the patent rights to Big Pharma, which we did. However, the company did not develop it further. We learned that there were unfortunate market mechanisms involved: The reimbursement companies receive for cancer drugs is 10-15 times higher than for pain drugs. So the marketing authorization holders for EGFR Inhibitors didn’t have any incentive to develop the drug for neuropathic pain.
That took us a long time to learn, but we continued our research in parallel. Later, we took up a loan, hired a lawyer, and got our patent rights back. We raised funding and founded our company to bring EGFR inhibitors to patients suffering from neuropathic pain. That was in January 2023.
So although I had a really nice life, it changed completely in 2023. Since then, I have been doing things I know little about and the learning curve is steep. Nevertheless, at this point in time, I think that my colleague Marte Cameron and I are the best in the world to advance this solution. I did not need to become a leader or go into this field, but I'm the one person in the world who knows most about it, and I have an obligation to help neuropathic pain patients as fast as possible.
Christian’s full profile is available for our members inside the community.