Turning academic discoveries into future medicines
Denmark’s universities and hospitals are home to many talented scientists at the forefront of life sciences. Every year, they make discoveries with the potential to transform medicine and improve lives. Yet many bright ideas never leave the lab – instead they fall into an ‘innovation gap’ between academic research and the market place. With its Frontier Grants programme, the Lundbeck Foundation aims to help them close that gap.
Launched by the Lundbeck Foundation in 2022, the philanthropic Frontier Grants scheme has funded 13 projects to date, with more in the pipeline. Here we visit the programme to explore what’s happened since it began and to ask some of the key people behind the projects what their experiences have been like so far.
Bringing discoveries to lives
Researchers at Denmark’s academic institutions have both the technical and scientific know-how to help millions of people – not only in Denmark, but all around the world – to live longer, healthier, happier lives. Their innovation potential is enormous, according to Paul Kristjansen, Senior Scientific Director at the Lundbeck Foundation and leader of the Frontier Grants programme. But all too often, their academic insights fail to make the leap from discovery to therapeutic.
Facilitates transitions from basic research to attractive prospects for biotech investors
Supports critical activities to advance and consolidate basic research projects, with significant potential, into attractive prospects for investors.
The purpose of the grant is to advance mature research projects to become financeable and commercially tangible venture opportunities.
“Danish universities are actually quite good at attracting academic grants to further new and promising ideas,” Kristjansen said. But when it comes to reproducing data, making them more robust, researchers often find they have exhausted all of the classical grant mechanisms long before they have created anything that is close to becoming a new medicine.
“Academic funding sources prioritise scientific novelty and may be less keen on follow-on grants. They are sometimes also reluctant to back spin-off entities which are not purely academic in nature. Researchers are told, ‘What you are doing is too commercial.’”
Too often they encounter a financial vacuum – a hole into which many promising projects disappear. “Our idea was to create a bridge over that gap,” Kristjansen explained.
The aim for the Frontier Grants scheme is therefore simple: to take mature research, rooted in non-commercial Danish research institutions, and make it investor-ready. Each award consists of a philanthropic grant of around DKK 5 million (about EUR 670,000) over 18 months, plus vital hands-on mentoring from Paul Kristjansen and his team, along with external experts. There is also the possibility of a six-month, DKK 2.5m extension.
An indication-agnostic enterprise
So, what sort of projects has the Frontier Grants scheme backed? And what’s the application process like?
Nanna Junker, Scientific Programme Manager, explained: “Because Frontier Grants are philanthropic awards, we can only invest in entities that are not commercial, so they can’t have any prior investors with future commercial rights.”
“But we can invest in ‘pre-companies’ – including those registered as companies with the Danish authorities, as long as there’s been no money going through their books like salaries being paid.”
She stressed that, while the Lundbeck Foundation is known for its strength in neuroscience, psychiatry and neurodegenerative diseases, the Frontier Grants scheme is indication-agnostic.
What it means is quite simple. “We will consider anything that’s a potential drug therapeutic for human use,” Junker said.
Read more about the Lundbeck Foundation Frontier Grants
Frontier Grants facilitate transitions from basic research to attractive prospects for biotech investors
A learning experience
Since the scheme was set up, the Frontier Grants team has formally considered close to 100 applications – and held informal talks with many more teams. Often, applicants are turned down to start with, but Junker stressed that did not mean ‘goodbye’.
“Don’t think you need to have a finished package before applying. We try to have an open-door policy so people can reach out,” Junker said.
“Some have barely stepped outside the university lab before, and those we help to understand how biotech investing works, how venture capital functions, and what an investable project should look like from the start.”
“We take pride in the fact that we can help groups that come to us who might not be ready yet. We might say, ‘Go and mature what you are working on. Look at these directions. Then come back to us in a year or two and we’ll talk again.’”
The application process starts with a series of informal conversations that gradually help teams adopt a commercial mindset. The Frontier Grants team asks searching questions such as: What’s missing? What data would an investor need? Where are the risks and the inflection points?
“Most recipients say the application process in itself is a learning experience,” Junker said. “It helps them acquire a more commercial mindset and understand why an investor needs such information. And let’s be honest – if you are in academia, understanding the path to commercialisation can be challenging.”
Venture discipline
To ensure each recipient is fighting fit for investment, the Frontier Grants team works closely with the Lundbeck Foundation’s venture capital (VC) investment arm, 鶹 BioCapital.
This collaboration is not meant to force direct investments, rather, to pressure-test the candidates’ ideas by offering an investor perspective – raising issues that might not have been thought about before, regarding areas such as unmet need, differentiation, the clinical development path and manufacturability.
And there are no strings attached. Paul Kristjansen emphasised: “What we do is entirely philanthropic. We try to identify: What’s missing? What in the set-up can be improved, and what in the end would prevent a classical VC from investing?”
Lars Gredsted, Senior Principal at 鶹 BioCapital, explained: “We take what we know from our discussions with other investors and pharma companies, and apply these learnings to help Frontier Grant applicants or recipients. What do investors and potential pharma partners think of a particular technology or indication, for instance? What level of data do they typically need to see, before they would consider investing?”
Since the scheme started, Gredsted has spent many hours providing support. One advantage of the programme over similar arrangements, he noted, was “the ability to mature a project for longer within a university setting before you actually put it out there as a commercial entity, while at the same time bringing in early insights and guidance from the venture capital world”.
While 鶹 BioCapital can invest in a Frontier Grants project – and has already done so on one occasion – this won’t necessarily be the case for all successful projects. “There is absolutely no expectation that a project team has to end up doing a deal with us,” Gredsted emphasised.
Tailored practical help
Once a project has been awarded a Frontier Grant, what practical help can it expect?
Kristjansen said that very much depended on the recipient, as they were “a very diverse group”.
“Some have barely stepped outside the university lab before, and those we help to understand how biotech investing works, how venture capital functions, and what an investable project should look like from the start,” he said. Such recipients also benefited from formal mentoring.
“But at the other end of the spectrum we have serial entrepreneurs who have kept their university affiliation. And that’s fine – we’d love to be part of their new idea, as long as it isn’t related to an active, existing company.”
The intention is to get each project, over 18 months, to the point where a venture fund or other partner wants to invest. If that happens quicker, the Frontier Grants team cheers it on. And if it takes a little longer, the door is open to a short extension – because the bridge is there to be crossed.
Aiming high
However, although the Frontier Grants team strongly believes that patience is a virtue, they are explicit that not all projects will, or even should, succeed. “If you really want to move the needle on innovation, you should expect some failures,” Gredsted said. “If every Frontier Grants project were to succeed, we haven’t set our ambitions high enough.”
What the participants said
To understand the programme’s impact, we spoke directly with some of the key people involved – the grant recipients themselves – to see how the programme has helped them advance.
Aligning to investor requirements
Lasse Reimer, a postdoc at Aarhus University, was awarded a Frontier Grant in 2023 to advance a project aiming to treat Parkinson’s disease in an entirely new way, using fungal toxins.
Serial entrepreneur Claus Elsborg Olesen, Professor in Biomedical Innovation at Aarhus University, who is also involved alongside project lead Professor Poul Henning, valued the conversational approach. Prof Olesen said: “Because you present your project orally first, you get a really good discussion about what’s relevant, what the risks are, and the key inflection points you’d hope to achieve with the grant. You end up with a much stronger written application – and a much stronger final project.”
Prof Olesen also said the Frontier Grants scheme enabled the team to think beyond the lab, to visualise the practical and commercial considerations important to investors.
He admitted: “Us academics – we often have an idea, but it isn’t always aligned with what investors are looking for, right?”
The Lundbeck Foundation fuels young neuroscientist’s biotech vision with a DKK 5 million grant
Nurturing the right idea
Postdoc Ida Marie Boi Jacobsen, who is pursuing a new non-hormonal treatment for menopause which could also lower the risk of osteoporosis and heart disease in post-menopausal women, secured a Frontier Grant in mid-2025.
Jacobsen is part of the research unit of Professor Martin Blomberg Jensen, a top endocrinologist at Copenhagen’s Herlev and Gentofte Hospital.
They approached the Frontier Grants team, who initially turned the project down on the basis it was “a little immature”, Prof Jensen said. “But they were right. They gave us some recommendations, and we went and matured it for a year or so – and then they agreed to the grant.”
As well as the funding, Jacobsen said she was benefiting from professional mentoring: “It gives me an entirely new understanding of what it takes to develop a treatment and to make investors see the potential.”
With a Frontier Grant backing her, molecular medicine researcher Ida Marie Boi Jacobsen aims to develop a new oestrogen-free treatment...
Tough love
Sometimes tough love is required, such as telling an applicant that their idea isn’t going to work or advising them it would be best to pivot because, as Kristjansen put it, “they are heading in the wrong direction”.
Among those to have pivoted is Professor Grith Lykke Sørensen of the University of Southern Denmark. She came to the Frontier Grants team with a plan to develop an antibody to combat retinal disease, having already got to the stage of testing it in animals.
But after a series of “constructive, open discussions” with the Frontier Grants team and 鶹 BioCapital, she decided to concentrate on fibrotic liver conditions such as MASH (Metabolic dysfunction–Associated Steatohepatitis) instead.
Sørensen said: “Their judgement was that the market was better in the liver fibrotic area, which we also had data on, though not as extensive as in the retinal field. But we had positive data in liver fibrosis, so we decided to move in that direction.”
Professor Grith Lykke Sørensen from the University of Southern Denmark has vast ambitions. She aims to develop a medication for liver...
A valuable combination of support
Ditte Elisabeth Jæhger, whose team at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) is developing an injectable genomic medicine to stop degeneration that leads to knee osteoarthritis, received a Frontier Grant in August 2024.
The award has helped her group pay for external validation studies which, Jæhger said, “can be difficult to get funded, because academic grants won’t usually cover that sort of work. But they are essential to attract investors.”
Like her fellow grantees, she also acknowledged the valuable combination of support from both a scientific and commercial perspective. “Their advice has helped keep us on track,” Jæhger said.
Researchers from DTU Health Tech are aiming to help osteoarthritis sufferers with a combination of genomic medicine and a special...
