Raphaël Ognar

Raphaël Ognar is President, CEO, Co-Founder and Chairman of NKILT Therapeutics, a biotech developing an allogeneic cell therapy technology. He spent years inside big pharma running drug development programs and working on P&L in strategy for the CEO and CFO, and he carried two small molecules through to approval. He left that track to build a consultancy and then to found his own company.

Raphaël Ognar leads NKILT Therapeutics, a small biotech developing an allogeneic cell therapy technology, after years inside big pharma. On Open Door Salon, discussing who can absorb a delay, he tied how a company treats failure to its cash position: “big pharma doesn’t characterize failure the same way a small biotech will just for a very simple reason. Big pharma has cash and we don’t as small biotechs”.

Raphaël Ognar argues that the human review layer in drug development cannot be delegated to a model. On Open Door Salon he described finding a scientific citation an AI had invented, and quoted what he told it: “I said I don’t know is more than satisfactory and it’s definitely better than lying”. He treats prompting as a discipline of its own: “if you don’t ask the right question, you cannot expect the right answer”. He has also said his own pitch deck contains no mention of AI.

Raphaël Ognar left big pharma, along with the salary and the career path attached to it, to build a consultancy and then to found his own company, NKILT Therapeutics. He is direct about what the transition cost him personally and professionally.