New company wants to help life science start-ups fail faster

COMPANY PORTRAIT: Some 40 percent of all life science start-ups fail because the science doesn’t hold up. Biohagen Labs is a new CRO or Contract Research Organisation. The company wants to make sure that cutting-edge biotech start-ups succeed better or fail before failure becomes shockingly expensive. With a location in the heart of Innovation District Copenhagen and combined decades of experimental experience, the three co-founders are confident that their contribution beats most established CROs. By Jes Andersen.

Specialist service for university spin-outs

Life science start-ups are typically founded by university researchers who have discovered that a particular protein or gene is involved in a disease or that a certain molecule seems to work against an ailment. Figuring out HOW it works, and how to get it to work consistently, requires a set of skills that very few start-ups can afford to build up in-house. That is where the CRO comes in.

We like to enter cutting-edge projects, where very few people know how systems and techniques work yet. Because we are very experienced and rather creative, we can design experiments to explain why something isn’t working and figure out what it takes to make it work. We know for a fact, that some of the solutions we have come up with have saved start-up projects”: Kasper Langebjerg Andersen, CSO Biohagen Labs.

Experience in helping new companies

Most routine CRO-work is sent to China or India, but Biohagen feel that they have a competitive edge. The three co-founders all have strong scientific backgrounds in molecular biology and biochemistry. For three years they worked together in SeedLab, an initiative supporting life science start-ups funded by Novo Holdings. Here their expertise in specialized pre-clinical measurements helped lots of newly minted companies.

Our work in SeedLab gave us a deep understanding of which capabilities start-ups can build up themselves, and what they typically need to outsource. It also gave us a lot of training in designing “Killer experiments”, to analyse the viability of the science before building up an expensive start-up organization”: Paul Cloos, CEO Biohagen

Sharing knowledge with clients

Biohagen has been lucky enough to be able to co-locate with the University of Copenhagen research centre BRIC (Biotech Research and Innovation Centre) in the heart of the innovation district. Co-location brings perks like getting to use some of the highly specialised instruments usually reserved for academics and their students. The Biohagen team likes to think, though, that they provide more than just the rent in return.

BRIC has always been start-up friendly, and now we too are a start-up. They are happy to have us here, because doctors and academics are not usually educated in innovation thinking, and there we can inspire and help the start-ups spin out of BRIC. We feel we have a special edge, in that the start-ups get access to the knowledge and experiences we develop during our projects”: Jonatan Støier, COO, Biohagen

Dreams of providing “wet due diligence”

The company’s first customer is no start-up, however. Surprisingly, for the team, their first paying client is a “sizeable Danish pharmaceutical company that wishes to remain anonymous” requesting assistance in establishing some novel cutting-edge assays. While this contract is for biochemical sleuthing, the team also hopes to be hired for “Wet due diligence” for venture capital firms in the future.

Normal due-diligence reports are primarily market analyses. What we can provide is a scientific analysis and wetlab experiments directly assessing whether the science will hold up. When the science “breaks” it is often due to small details, and we have deep experience in exploring these”: Kasper Langebjerg Andersen, CSO, Biohagen Labs.

Preferred partner in innovation district

The CRO start-up aims to cater to all of Europe but hopes to become a preferred partner for life science start-ups in the innovation district. For this reason, they hope that the district will develop much stronger networking opportunities. As it happens, this is one of the ambitions in the district vision-plan published 8th September 2025.