Our co-founder Michal Zahradníček spoke with E15 about his journey from a successful IT career to biotechnology, why European research so rarely makes it from the laboratory to the market, and why the future of healthcare lies in treating the causes of disease rather than its symptoms.

In 2007, Michal sold his IT company BGS Levi, then with a turnover of over CZK 15 billion. He felt something deeper was missing and wanted to give part of his success back to society, which led him to biomedicine.

His first lesson came quickly: CZK 25 million given to a research team brought no progress within a year. Michal realised they had to do it themselves and founded Primecell Advanced Therapy, whose National Tissue and Cell Centre has grown into Europe’s number one player in its field, helping tens of thousands of patients every year.

European research accounts for around 25% of the world’s scientific publications, yet companies emerging from it represent only 10–15% of the global market. According to Michal, Europe is overfunded in discovery and underfunded in technology transfer and execution.

In the Czech Republic, CZK 350 billion has gone into basic research over the past decade, yet results measured by licences sold remain close to zero, while Oxford and Cambridge each sell around a hundred licences a year. In his view, many research institutions are still reluctant to engage in commercialisation.

This is exactly the gap LIFE bioCEEd was created to address. We invest in very early-stage medical research across Europe: since the start of 2025, we have assessed around 500 projects and selected ten so far, including BreathPredict, a UK company whose device identifies the type of asthma within ten seconds.

Surprisingly, almost no one else invests at this stage, not even in Western Europe. Our goal is to return at least ten times the capital invested, and one investment has already received an offer of up to a hundred times.

Michal’s overarching goal is what he calls Medicine 4.0: technologies that treat the root cause of chronic disease rather than its symptoms. “We want to cure, not just treat,” he says.

The interview also covers:

· How Primecell’s new supercritical CO2 technology creates a new category of tissue grafts

· Why psychedelics and NK cells could treat many conditions at once

· Why change in healthcare will come from patients and insurers, not top-down reform

· How healthcare may look in ten years

Read the full article on E15: https://www.e15.cz/rozhovory/uspel-v-it-ale-chybel-mu-hlubsi-smysl-dnes-chce-investor-zahradnicek-zmenit-pristup-k-lecbe-1436186