In a pharmaceutical industry often content with incremental innovation, there occasionally emerges a leader who dares to challenge and disrupt the status quo. Dr. Kelvin Stott, a British biochemist-turned-entrepreneur based in Basel, is one of them. As the co-founder and CEO of Amporin Pharmaceuticals AG, a Swiss biotech startup he launched in 2024, Stott brings over two decades of diverse experience across pharma R&D, business consulting, venture capital, and biotech entrepreneurship.

Stott’s vision for Amporin is as bold as it is personal: to cure, rather than merely treat, the devastating wave of age-related degenerative diseases that plague humanity — a growing crisis that affects some 540 million people worldwide. These disorders, driven by protein misfolding, include Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, type II diabetes, ALS, Huntington’s disease, and many other rare degenerative diseases. Together, they account for 3.6 million deaths annually with an economic burden of $3 trillion each year. Despite a $95 billion drug market dedicated to these diseases, effective treatments remain elusive, and the problem is growing rapidly with the aging population.

Uninterested in a conventional Q&A interview, Stott is intent on conveying the essence of his mission. “Maybe it’s better if I just talk about what I’m doing and what really drives me — my philosophy,” he says as our conversation begins, his voice carrying a quiet intensity that hints at the intellectual power within.

Breaking the Mold: Choosing Impact Over Academia

Stott’s journey started in the halls of academia but soon took a different turn. After earning a Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry with Management from the University of Sussex, he completed a PhD in Neuroscience and Protein Engineering at the University of Cambridge, working under world-renowned scientists Sir Alan Fersht and Nobel laureate Max Perutz. A prestigious Research Fellowship at Cambridge followed. Yet, despite the accolades, Stott realized academia wasn’t where he could make the difference he sought.

“I left academia because I didn’t want to spend my life writing grant applications and papers that nobody ever reads,” he says, candidly. “I found the bureaucracy frustrating. What really drives me is applying innovation to make a real, tangible difference to people’s lives.”

Fueled by that desire for impact, Stott ventured onto an unconventional career path.

“In 20 years, I’ve worked across consulting, biotech, pharma, venture investing… it’s not a straight-line career,” he reflects. “What’s kept me moving is an interest in health innovation — wherever I could make a contribution.”

This broad experience — from advising top pharmaceutical firms to launching startups — gave him a panoramic view of the industry’s challenges and opportunities. But one guiding principle has remained constant:

“Whatever role I’ve taken, it’s always been about making an impact. That’s been the thread running through everything.”

The Genesis of Amporin: A Strategic Response to a Global Need

By 2024, after two decades of insight across the life sciences, Stott saw a rare opportunity to tackle a challenge that had long captured his focus: degenerative diseases driven by protein misfolding. Believing that traditional approaches were falling short, he set out to create something different — a company built from the ground up to address the root cause of these devastating illnesses.

Alongside two experienced colleagues, Dr. Hervé Schaffhauser (Chief Scientific Officer) and Professor Daniel Umbricht, MD (Chief Medical Officer), Stott co-founded Amporin Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland. Both Schaffhauser and Umbricht brought over 20 years of neuroscience R&D experience to the venture, creating a leadership team uniquely equipped to tackle one of medicine’s toughest frontiers.

From the outset, Amporin attracted attention. Early backers, including Venture Kick and Kickfund, provided CHF 350,000 in pre-seed financing, a strong vote of confidence in the company’s bold but carefully reasoned vision.

“We saw a global unmet need that existing treatments weren’t addressing,” Stott explains. “Rather than managing symptoms, we wanted to design therapies that could truly modify the disease process itself — and ultimately change patients’ lives.”

The founding team knew that achieving this goal meant going beyond conventional thinking. They set their sights on the most fundamental biological mechanism at play, building Amporin’s approach around it.

A Revolutionary Approach: Targeting the Root Cause of Degeneration

At the heart of Amporin’s strategy is a breakthrough insight: across dozens of degenerative diseases, a common biological culprit emerges. In conditions like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, ALS, type II diabetes, and many rare disorders, proteins misfold and aggregate, forming toxic structures that damage cells.

Research increasingly shows that these misfolded proteins form toxic soluble oligomers — small clumps that create tiny, deadly holes, known as “amyloid pores,” in cell and mitochondrial membranes. This membrane damage leads to calcium imbalance, oxidative stress, inflammation, and ultimately, cell death.

“There’s a growing consensus that amyloid pores are a major driver of degeneration,” Stott explains. “Yet surprisingly, no one had developed a therapy to directly target and neutralize this mechanism.”

Amporin’s solution is built around this insight. The company is developing three proprietary classes of small molecules designed to block, dissolve, or eliminate amyloid pores:

• Amporbans: block amyloid pores to stop uncontrolled calcium influx.
• Amporins: dissolve amyloid pores from within cell membranes.
• Amportacs: tag amyloid pores for destruction by the body’s own cleanup systems.

“Each of these platforms is novel,” Stott says. “They represent a completely new class of drug compounds — designed from first principles to address a core pathogenic process.”

If successful, Amporin’s therapies could offer something unprecedented: a simple, oral treatment capable of halting or even reversing disease progression across multiple major degenerative diseases. The team is initially focusing on Parkinson’s disease and ALS as their first targets.

Remarkable Preclinical Results: A Glimmer of Hope

Although Amporin’s journey is still in its early stages, the first results have been nothing short of remarkable. In preliminary studies, a single oral dose of the company’s prototype compound fully restored cognitive and motor function in mouse models of both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease — without causing any adverse effects in healthy animals.

“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” Stott says, his voice measured but unmistakably hopeful. “To see complete functional restoration within hours after just one dose in diseased models gives us real optimism about what might be possible in humans.”

The results offer a rare glimmer of hope in a field where many treatments have struggled even to slow disease progression, let alone reverse it.

Encouraged by these findings, Amporin is charting a rapid, biomarker-driven clinical development path. Parkinson’s disease will be the first focus. The company plans to start with a Phase 1a trial in healthy volunteers to confirm safety and tolerability, followed swiftly by a Phase 1b trial in Parkinson’s patients to explore early signs of efficacy.

During these early trials, the team will use a battery of innovative biomarkers — including specialized brain imaging, speech and motor function tests, sleep monitoring, and EEG patterns — to track biological effects and confirm that the therapy is working as intended.

“We’re designing the clinical studies to be as informative as possible, even from the earliest phases,” Stott explains. “If we can show we’re hitting the underlying mechanism, and start to see signs of real clinical benefit, it could change everything.”

It’s an ambitious plan — but one grounded in a careful, data-driven approach designed to move quickly from lab discovery to patient impact.

A Proven Leader in Pharmaceutical Innovation

As bold as Amporin’s ambitions are, Stott’s credibility rests on a career defined by innovation, impact, and leadership across some of the most respected organizations in pharma and biotech.

Before founding Amporin, he served as Head of R&D Portfolio Management at CSL Behring in Switzerland, where he built a new portfolio management function and helped oversee an R&D budget of roughly $1 billion. Earlier, at Sensyne Health, he led efforts to apply real-world patient data and artificial intelligence to improve drug development strategies — including innovations like virtual control arms for clinical trials.

During his time at Novartis, Stott helped design and implement a system to prioritize over 80 drug development projects. He also led the development of an AI-driven tool to estimate the probability of success for R&D programs, helping to guide investment decisions across a $4 billion annual budget.

His earlier experience included biotech venture capital at Inventages, strategy consulting with McKinsey, and leading biotech startups — experience that sharpened his sense of what drives success (and failure) in drug development.

Notably, Amporin isn’t Stott’s first attempt to tackle neurodegenerative diseases through entrepreneurship. In 2001, fresh out of Cambridge, he founded Senexis Ltd, a biotech startup focused on diseases of protein misfolding.

“Senexis was an incredible learning experience,” Stott reflects. “Even though we didn’t reach the breakthroughs we hoped for, it gave me a deep understanding of what’s needed to succeed — scientifically, operationally, and strategically.”

Now, with the benefit of two decades more experience, he’s applying those lessons with renewed focus at Amporin.

The Founding Team: A Wealth of Experience

Stott is quick to emphasize that Amporin’s mission is not a solo effort. From the beginning, he was determined to assemble a founding team with the depth of experience needed to bridge cutting-edge science with real-world drug development.

Dr. Hervé Schaffhauser, Amporin’s Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder, brings more than 20 years of experience in neuropharmacology and CNS drug discovery. At companies like Roche and Merck, and later in biotech ventures, Schaffhauser led programs that moved neurological disease targets from early discovery through preclinical development and into human trials.

Professor Daniel Umbricht, MD, Chief Medical Officer and co-founder, adds clinical development expertise from over 30 years working at the forefront of neuroscience. As Global Head of Translational Medicine in Neuroscience at Roche, he oversaw early-stage clinical research for brain disorders and has held key roles at Novartis, biotech companies like Autifony Therapeutics and Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals, and in clinical practice.

“I feel very fortunate to be working alongside Hervé and Daniel,” Stott says. “Their experience across both discovery science and clinical development gives us a real edge — and we share a common purpose to make a meaningful difference for patients.”

Together, the team blends visionary thinking with practical, hands-on know-how — exactly the combination needed to turn a bold scientific idea into a viable therapy.

Funding the Future of Neurological Health

Turning Amporin’s vision into reality will require not only scientific innovation, but significant financial backing. Stott estimates the company will need around CHF 10–12 million to advance its lead drug candidate for Parkinson’s disease through preclinical development and into the first human trials.

Having already secured CHF 350,000 in initial funding — including support from Venture Kick and Kickfund — Amporin is now preparing for a larger Seed financing round in early 2025. A smaller bridge round of around CHF 2–3 million may precede it to accelerate key milestones.

These funds will be critical for:

• Building out laboratory and office infrastructure in Basel
• Expanding the core scientific team
• Advancing preclinical data generation and strengthening intellectual property
• Selecting the best lead compound candidates for Parkinson’s and ALS
• Completing required preclinical efficacy and toxicity studies
• Preparing for and filing an Investigational New Drug (IND) application to launch clinical trials

Stott is optimistic about the road ahead. Early signs of industry interest are strong, with multiple major pharmaceutical companies already expressing enthusiasm.

“We’ve had serious engagement from three or four major pharma companies,” Stott says. “That kind of interest is rare at this stage — but I think it reflects that we’re pursuing something truly unique, with the potential for real impact.”

Beyond near-term fundraising, Stott envisions a long-term path where Amporin, after proving its approach in early clinical trials, could become an attractive acquisition target — helping to bring its therapies to market on a global scale.

Challenging an Unsustainable Model

Stott’s vision extends beyond Amporin. He’s deeply aware that the broader pharmaceutical industry is grappling with systemic challenges — and that bold innovation is urgently needed.

“I’ve always been drawn to understanding the bigger picture — not just the science, but the industry itself,” he reflects.

One critical trend he has studied closely is the declining return on investment (ROI) in pharma R&D. Analyses by groups like BCG, Deloitte, and his own independent research have documented a sharp drop: companies are spending more on drug development but getting fewer new medicines approved — a trajectory that, if unchecked, threatens the industry’s sustainability.

Part of the problem, Stott explains, stems from the law of diminishing returns. As standards of care improve, each new drug must deliver even greater benefits — often at higher costs — just to compete. Yet many companies continue to follow traditional R&D models without fundamentally rethinking their approach.

“Incremental improvements aren’t enough anymore,” he says. “To really move the needle, we need to pursue bigger leaps — whether that’s new biological mechanisms, new modalities like cell and gene therapies, or completely different ways of designing and developing treatments.”

Stott believes that companies willing to embrace more imaginative science, take calculated risks, and operate with greater agility will thrive — while others risk stagnation.

At Amporin, this philosophy is more than theory. It’s embedded in the company’s DNA: targeting a root cause of degeneration that has been overlooked for decades, and building novel therapies from first principles.

The Driving Force: Passion, Purpose, and a Cosmological Perspective

Beyond the lab and boardroom, Stott’s motivation comes from a deeper source: a lifelong passion for understanding the fundamental nature of the world — and a desire to make a meaningful difference.

That mindset was evident early. At 17, Stott developed a theory predicting that the expansion of the universe should be accelerating against gravity — an idea he boldly shared in a letter to Stephen Hawking.

“Hawking very politely replied to say that, based on known physics at the time, it wasn’t possible,” Stott recalls, smiling. “But about ten years later, the Nobel prize-winning discovery of dark energy proved otherwise.”

This early experience — challenging accepted wisdom and later seeing validation — left a lasting mark. It shaped his willingness to question assumptions, follow the evidence, and persist with ideas even when they seemed improbable.

His creative energy also extends into inventing. Stott designed the Qubami puzzle, a 3D brain teaser that combines the logic of Sudoku with the twisty mechanism of a Rubik’s Cube — another reflection of his love for problem-solving and thinking differently.

“What drives me, always, is trying to do something new — something that can make a real difference,” he says simply.

Whether unraveling cosmic mysteries, designing extreme logic puzzles, or developing potential cures for devastating diseases, Stott’s pursuits are united by a restless curiosity, a refusal to accept limits, and a search for lasting impact.

Where Work and Life Blur in the Quest for a Cure

Given the intensity of his mission, it’s no surprise that Stott’s work-life balance leans heavily toward work. He speaks about it with candor and without complaint.

“Honestly, I don’t manage it very well,” he admits with a modest smile. “I’m often working until three in the morning and back at it by nine. I sleep about four hours a night.”

During the week, Stott is fully immersed in Amporin, trying to carve out at least one day on weekends to spend time with his family. Even so, he doesn’t frame the long hours as a sacrifice.

“It’s not painful for me,” he explains. “I love every minute of it. It’s all driven by purpose and passion — and the feeling that it might actually make a real difference.”

For Stott, the line between work and personal life has blurred into a singular calling. Despite the long hours, he draws energy from the mission itself: the belief that each hour of effort might help bring a transformative therapy closer to reality. It’s a level of dedication few can sustain — but for Stott, it feels natural. Purpose, not pressure, is what keeps him going.

Advice for the Next Generation

Reflecting on his own unconventional path, Stott is eager to share some advice with younger generations — including his own children — about navigating life and career choices.

“As I always tell my kids, don’t worry too much about figuring it all out right away,” he says. His youngest is 17, while his eldest is already studying engineering at university.

He often jokes with them:

“I still haven’t really worked out what I want to do when I grow up.”

The point, he explains, is that life isn’t a straight path. Interests evolve, opportunities appear unexpectedly, and passions can emerge in surprising ways. Rather than trying to plan everything from the start, Stott encourages a more organic approach.

“If you follow your interests, your purpose, your passion — go where your heart leads you — you’ll find opportunities to do something meaningful,” he says. “And if you stay curious and open-minded, you’ll keep learning and growing along the way.”

His parting advice is simple but powerful:

“Don’t try to paint yourself into a box. Get out there, explore, and learn as much as you can.”

It’s advice drawn not from theory, but from experience — from a life spent questioning norms, pursuing big ideas, and seeking impact beyond conventional boundaries.

Thinking Big, Together

Throughout his career, Stott has remained guided by two principles: the courage to think differently, and the understanding that real progress is a collective effort.

“Think big and different, explore the unknown, challenge the status quo, ask the right questions, seek the truth, fail cheap, and learn fast,” he says — a mantra that has shaped his journey across science, industry, and entrepreneurship.

But just as important, he emphasizes, is the power of shared purpose.

“Nobody can achieve anything truly meaningful alone,” he reflects. “The big things — the things that really matter — are only possible when people come together around a common goal, built on mutual trust and respect.”

These twin ideals — daring to innovate, and the humility to collaborate — define both Stott’s leadership style and Amporin’s culture. They are the foundation from which the company is striving to reshape the fight against degenerative diseases.

If Stott and his team succeed, the world could witness a breakthrough far greater than another incremental treatment: the possibility of halting, or even reversing, some of the most devastating diseases of our time.

And for Stott, that possibility — no matter how ambitious — is worth every ounce of effort.

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Also Read: The 10 Most Influential Leaders in Pharma and Biotech, 2025