Hello my name is David Sourdive, I have started my curricula with my studies at the Ecole Polytechnique. My first passion, was particle physics, more specifically quantum mechanics. At the same time, I had noticed at the library that the books and leaflets describing the course of events in biology changed every second year, or third year, sometimes less, and that was due to new findings or phenomenon descriptions which were achieved by small teams. Five to six person in a lab in Harvard or Stanford or elsewhere, had found something and it completely or partially changed the way dogma was being considered. I thought, biology is eventually experiencing the changes physics experienced at the beginning of the 20th century with Niels Bohr, Planck and all these folks, well it is happening now in biology, and in the end it might be in this discipline that the most exciting things are going to happen. My drive had always been to live interesting moments with regards to History. So, I decided to opt for biology at Polytechnique. It was an option in my class. Then, I embarked on a reseach thesis at the Institut Pasteur, a thesis on molecular virology. I was mainly working on the way we regulate our genes. And then I begun a post-doctoral internship in Emory, Atlanta, United States, to work on antiviral immunology and understand how our immune system generates a range of cells which will serve to kill viruses and reject the pathogenic bacteria which attack us. In the meantime, when it ended I had joined a community, the armament corps which had kind of convinced me to work with them on the expertise they needed in that area, in the field of biology, which was rather limited back then and which in fact needed people who had some experience in these matters. So, this was my academic curricula. It wasn't before late 1999, when we created Cellectis in Paris, with André Choulika that I turned to the business world. And as real business experience I only have that of Cellectis, a business I co-founded with André. So, we had the idea to create the business when in fact, we met André Choulika and myself. He was studying in the same Masters, in 1990 at the Institut Pasteur, it was on a February evening and we figured that maybe someday we should create a business which would shape the human beings' genome to be able to slightly modulate their application, model the cells for therapy purposes, production purposes or other purposes. And we thought that the DNA, the common object to all living things which in the end, bears the heredity and determinism, is the matter on which we should work in the first place. So, we had that vision because we compared it to what happened to chemistry in the early 20th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, there wasn't a Chemistry, they were multiple chemistry trends and in the 1920s an ability to arrange the atoms within the molecules arised, it has concentrated within big organisations, the big industrial groups which had developed this capacity to produce molecules in the pharmaceutical industry, in agriculture, in the industry of the materials, of energy in a very vast manner. We thought, "the living is going to experience the exact same thing. probably in the 21st century, because the living will become a matter of engineers. We are about to leave the contemplative phase where the living is being described as a mere black box with smaller groups that are being studied. We are about to enter a world where we will be able to model it, to carry out an accurate, targeted and repeatable modification of the genome, measure the change and change again, thus closing the engineer's loop and shift the living to a world of applications. Industrial applications in the first place and then clinical applications, since an objet must become an industrial object before becoming a clinical object. Hence, this very technological approach, the vision we had, implied that we had to start focusing on the genome engineering, an accurate, rational engineering for the genomes modeling, and to do so we had to find a starting point. We realised that Nature already held biological objects of which work, so to speak, was indeed to copy-paste the DNA. And these are the tiny molecular scissors that are found in the unicellular organisms, the micro-algae, in certain phages, bacteria viruses. There are not present in animals, nor in our organisms. We don't really know why but these tiny molecular scissors in a very, incredibly accurate way recognise some uniques spots of a genome, then copy and paste, they paste their own genes, in general, and it's a very interesting starting point because it means that Nature knows how to copy-paste its own DNA, and so we could start from there. And we had to start from these tools to be able then to not cut the genome of this or that algua, but be capable of doing that on whichever genes of the human being, of the plant, wherever it woud be useful later. So this vision, shifting from a contemplative world to that of the engineer, this focus thinking "we are going to work on the genome engineering because it's common to all living things and it's a bit strategic, it's pivotal"; And the idea to start working on molecular scissors which will then be used, deployed and developed in the business... At the time, you should keep in mind that the promise of the human genome, the complete sequence of the human genome were made for 2015, so naturally, we didn't create the business in 1990. We figured "let's start achieving the thesis, make technology progress, have a look at how things unfurl" but it wasn't an immediate plan. At least that was what we thought. As it turned out the first drafts of the human genome came in 1999 and this has changed everything. So, the decision of creating a business. There are two ways of addressing this question. There is: how is this vision going to materialise my project? And then: why did we create it at the time we did? So, why a business? Because clearly the stake was to turn to applications, the goal was to change for products which will have an economic impact. It was to find substantial financing for risky and heavy projects. Then the goal was not only the creation of tools to better understand the living, to resolve the dogma, the stake was to be able to develop things for very well defined and targeted purposes, heal patients, feed the world and, so to speak, get biology derived products not only derived from chemistry. So to complement the chemistry expertise with that of the living. The living can accomplish accurate actions, in an effecient way and it creates very sophisticated things. When it comes to creating simple molecules, chemistry can do it, combinations, et cetera. When it comes to specialised actions this is, normally the enzyme's work, the living things', the living world is more up to the task. That's why in the end we chose the business means. Why have we done it and why? This is very conjectural. There is always a spark phenomenon, circumstances that incite you to. André went to Harvard for his post-doc when I was in Emory, he had always been working on that field, when I had been a little further, on other subjects, other stakes, in the immunology area, more on the infections and infectious pathogenics. In short, a very end of the 1990s vision, where we realised the human genome was to occur much sooner than we thought. The popularisation and industrialisation of research in biology in the 1990s had been spectacular. When we, André and I, were sequencing during our thesis, we got 200 base pairs in one day we were happy. But the 1990s brought the capacity of getting thousands and billions of base pairs in one day. It was beginning to be very extraordinary and today's capacity is of 1.8 terabase per night, it's a whole other world. This evolution led to André calling me back and saying: "it's good to go and a number of green flags are up". The positive signals we got were in fact the Allègre bills, they had facilitated, and at the time showed results, so facilitated the project's transition from research to industry and the transition of people, so to enable researchers developing their projects within the business. The second thing was a will from the Institut Pasteur to expand and host the the creation of start-ups, with a governance transition, since Philippe Kourilsky, from the lab where I was working, was to be appointed head of the Institute and had very cleary demonstrated this policy. And then was, the National Competition for innovative technology businesses, which was then still called the Allègre Competition because it was still new. André had submitted our project from the United States a first time and it had been selected. So we were sort of sucked into on the system and we tried going back to France to launch the business, given we both had our commitments he with the Institut Pasteur, I both with the Institut Pasteur and within the DGA. So things were starting to get ligned up And the worked we had to carry out was in fact to identify the opportunities, the technological financial needs, and so on. and somewhere around December 1999, well I don't know why, we were determined, André might have convinced me then, and we started the business in December thinking, this is the right time, we must found the business prior to any discussion with the Institut Pasteur, we must create the business before going further. Owning a real company, was really going to make a difference and it wasn't just a future creation project, it was a real exisiting project. And the materialisation of the business has changed the opinion other peers had of us. We were no longer talking about a scientists' project but about a business project and the business was real and we represented it.
