Episode 244 - Erik Wiklund & Thomas Hansen - CEO & CTO of Circio

Max Brennan (0:06)

Erik, Thomas, welcome to The BioHub Podcast. Pleasure to feature you guys. Thanks for coming on.

Erik Wiklund (0:13)

Thanks, Calum. Thanks.

Max Brennan (0:15)

Yeah, I appreciate you guys taking the time. If you forgive the pun, I wanna circle back to the beginning with you guys, because I know you've been on a roll so far in 2026, but I think it's always useful context to, yeah, maybe for listeners tuning in who haven't heard of Circio before, and to get to know you guys a little bit and about your own journeys in biotech, but also how the company formed and various different guises under which it's, yeah, made its way to the here and now, basically.

Erik Wiklund (0:48)

Yeah, so Thomas and I, we used to be colleagues in the lab. Back in the late 2000s, we worked in the same lab during our PhDs.

And we were just serendipitously, I would say, stumbled across Circular RNA. We were looking for something else as one of those stories where a control didn't work as expected. And turned out it was a Circular RNA. And now we run a Circular RNA company. So that's a bit of fun. And of course, it adds to the whole motivation to try and get this to work. And I think maybe Thomas, you are probably a better position to talk a bit about that science and what we did back those days.

Thomas Hansen (1:33)

Yeah, it was quite an interesting period for both of us, I believe. But I mean, for me in particular, you know, now, thinking back, of course, the other day you were thinking back at 9-11, you vividly remember that day, right? And for me, similarly, when we sort of stumbled upon that Circular RNA, that one day where it all sort of made sense and you could have in some of that genetic data that you had and your lab work, it all sort of came together in it's a Circular RNA we're looking at. And I think that was quite an interesting thing. And I had again, I was lucky enough to have one of those episodes once more in my academic life. That was sort of a continuation of the work that Erik and I did. And we can come back to that potentially.

But yeah, that sort of spawned a lot of work and basically my whole academic career was based on that one lucky day in the office, essentially. So yeah, and here we are, basically in a sense, trying to leverage that know-how and all that information that we were gathering back in the days to develop these, what we believe is what we expect to be much better gene therapy approaches and cell therapy approaches.

Erik Wiklund (2:53)

I guess you could say that that day in the lab, you're referring to, I think maybe it was 2008 or 2009, has now, that directly led to these acquisitions this year by for example, Eli Lilly acquiring Orna Therapeutics for $2.4 billion. It's a consequence of that particular discovery on that day.

Max Brennan (3:13)

I mean, there's been some pretty good examples of science going in unexpected directions in history, right? And leading to some pretty good outcomes, some experiments set up in a certain way that delivers different results that resulted in massive breakthroughs. So yeah, nice. Cool. And how did you guys come about forming a company around that day in the lab? Like, can you talk to us a little bit about the inception of the business side of things?

Erik Wiklund (3:45)

I was running or working in a company that was developing immunotherapies. And one of those immunotherapies was an oncolytic virus. So a virus that they would inject into a tumor and it will kill the cancer cells. And that was really a hot, fashionable technology back in 2010, 2015

But come 2020, there were more concerns around that approach. And we had relatively good data, but they were small data sets. And the next step of our program had a price ticket over about $50 million we would need to raise to move forward in the clinic. And that became really difficult as this modality was going a bit out of fashion. And the financing window of during COVID and closed towards late 2021 So we were scrambling a bit to figure out what we do now. And then in parallel here, these circular RNA companies like Orna, which I mentioned before, and also Flagship launched a circular RNA company, Laurent, with big financing rounds, made me think, look, I have this story. I know all the people in the circular RNA space, and Thomas and I worked together in the past. So we felt here we have access to some key talent in this area, which is now super hot. And one of the reasons we were struggling a bit with this oncolytic adenovirus is that we couldn't get enough of the genetic payload it was carrying expressed. So then I had this idea, well, how about engineering our virus to express the gene via circular RNA? That should allow us to get more durable and higher gene expression, because the circular RNA is a much longer half-life than mRNA.