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TWST: Can we do a historical sketch of your Crucell and an overview of the things you are doing now?

Mr. Kruimer: Crucell is a company that was founded 10 years ago by three professors in gene therapy. It was based in the Netherlands and we developed technology to make gene vectors, which are the little vehicles used to bring genes into our body. About five years ago, we changed strategy and although we are still supplying the production technology to gene therapy companies, we ourselves have decided not to develop gene therapy products. We set our sights on proteins, antibodies and vaccines. What we are doing at the moment is developing vaccines and antibodies to combat infectious diseases. We have grown from very humble beginnings to 180 people that are employed with us today and 135 of those are directly employed in research and development. We have our own small-scale production plant. Until now it was used to do production services for our licensees, the people that licensed our production technology. Right now it's being readied to make clinical batches of the Ebola vaccine for clinical testing in the US. It's a project which falls under the Bio-shield strategy, of the Department of Homeland Security. We have successfully commercialized our production technology, which is a human cell platform which supports the production of vaccines, proteins and antibodies. We have over 30 licensees and partners, who all use our technology to ultimately produce one or more of their own products. By doing so, it makes us money; our future revenues come, for a significant part, from royalties on net sales of licensees products. In addition, we have 3 vaccines, which we are developing ourselves: a safer better flu shot, a whole, killed West Nile Vaccine and an Ebola vaccine. Four years ago, we started a company in genomics. The company is called Galapagos, like the islands where Darwin performed his genetics research. Last year, that company has gone through a very successful round of financing and now we have 21% ownership. Other shareholders are Johnson & Johnson, Burrill, Apax partners and Abingworth in the UK.

TWST: Can you describe the competitive landscape? How you see yourself in the field, in the sector?

Mr. Kruimer: I think we have to separate our business between the production technology and the vaccines which we are developing. The production technology that we have is unique because it is based on human cells. Conceptually it makes sense to produce human biologics on the human cells. We are unique in that area: there are no other companies that have human cells that they have out-licensed broadly like we do. All we try to do, in that respect, is to increase the acceptance in the industry, so that we will become a platform of choice for companies that wish to produce biologics. We do compete with alternate production systems. The most prevalent system in the industry is probably rodent cells, CHO cells, Chinese Hamster 3 Ovary cells. Big products in the market today like Retuxan and Herceptin from Genentech are made in this way.