Araris Biotech wins Strüngmann Award

(CONNECT) Araris Biotech from Au has beaten fellow finalists NovaGo from Schlieren ZH and Tolremo Therapeutics from Basel to win the Strüngmann Award 2025. With this prize, awarded for the second time this year, the twin brothers Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann honor entrepreneurs who establish groundbreaking technologies, especially in the biotech sector. The two founders of generics manufacturer Hexal and early investors in Biontech are awarding prize money of 100,000 euros.

The founding team of Dr. Dragan Gravulovski, Dr. Philipp Spycher and Dr. Isabella Attinger-Toller was selected as the winner by the jury "due to their combined leadership, entrepreneurial expertise and scientific excellence", according to the announcement. Arari's biotech technology could "establish a new generation of antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs). These ADCs have the potential to revolutionise the concept of targeted cancer therapy and could also be used in other medical fields in the future."

Araris Biotech's proprietary linker platform enables the linking of active substances to commercially available antibodies in just one step, without having to modify them. "The result," says the company, "is highly homogeneous, stable and effective ADC therapies."

The biotech company was founded in 2019 as a spin-off of the Paul Scherrer Institute and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Since then, Araris Biotech has raised over 40 million Swiss francs and concluded strategic partnerships with the pharmaceutical companies Chugai (Roche Nippon) and Johnson & Johnson. In March 2025, Araris was acquired by Taiho Pharmaceutical. The transaction has a total value of up to 1.14 billion dollars. ce/mm