Audrey Nsamela, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer of Inside Therapeutics
Audrey Nsamela, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer of Inside Therapeutics
Audrey Nsamela, PhD, Chief Scientific OfficeR of Inside Therapeutics
Biography
Audrey Nsamela, PhD, is the Chief Scientific Officer and one of the five co-founders of Inside Therapeutics, a French deeptech company based in Bordeaux on a mission to accelerate the development of nanomedicines. She grew up in a small town in Belgium and came to engineering relatively late, yet went on to build a deeply international and interdisciplinary scientific career.
Trained as a physics engineer at the Louvain School of Engineering in Belgium, she specialized in nanotechnology and bioengineering at Polytechnique Montréal before undertaking an industrial PhD carried out between France and TU Dresden. During her doctoral work, she studied the nucleation and physics of lipid nanoparticle and liposome formation. This is the very research that produced the patent now at the heart of Inside Therapeutics. Convinced this discovery would reach patients faster as a product than as another paper, she co-founded the company in 2022.
Today, Audrey leads the company’s scientific vision across two complementary technologies. TAMARA, launched in 2024, is a plug-and-play formulation system for R&D-stage development of RNA-LNPs and has become a reference for academic and industrial labs alike. Developed in parallel and built on the patent from her thesis, Nanopulse is the proprietary technology behind SERENA, a machine designed to carry a single, truly scalable process from early screening all the way to GMP production — without changing a single parameter. The company’s work has quickly been recognized with the French Deeptech label and the prestigious i-Lab award.
A firm believer in collaboration and science communication, Audrey is driven by a simple ambition: designing innovative machines that accelerate research against genetic, infectious and oncological diseases. Featured in the Mission French Tech’s “Women in French Tech” series, she continues to champion the idea that the most meaningful breakthroughs happen where scientific, industrial and human systems, along with the people behind them, finally start working together.
Interview
NanoSphere: Tell us a bit about yourself—your background, journey, and what led you to where you are today.
Audrey: I grew up in a small town near Brussels, in Belgium, and I have always been curious about everything. At various points I dreamed of becoming an astronomer, a chemist, a biologist, then a journalist. In high school I took social science courses, which definitely helped shape my way of thinking and my open-mindedness.
I then trained as an engineer in Belgium, at the Louvain School of Engineering. My heart was torn between biology and physics and, as the saying goes, ‘to choose is to give up’ — so I decided not to choose at all, and pursued a dual master’s degree pairing physical engineering with biomedical nanotechnology. For the second specialization, I spent two years in Canada, at Polytechnique Montréal, in a truly international and interdisciplinary environment. It felt like a mini-doctorate: I got to run a research project right at the interface between physics and biology. I rounded off my studies with an academic-industrial thesis in physical chemistry, carried out between the company Elveflow in France and TU Dresden in Germany. It was during that thesis that I discovered a new technology for manufacturing nanomedicines, in fact the one we patented before founding the company Inside Therapeutics.
NanoSphere: Your journey has taken you across Belgium, Canada, Germany, and France, while spanning engineering, physics, biomedical research, and entrepreneurship. Looking back, how did these international and interdisciplinary experiences shape your scientific identity and way of thinking? At what point did you realize that solving certain scientific challenges would require building a company rather than pursuing another research project, and what has this taught you about the importance of connecting scientific, industrial, and human systems to create meaningful impact?
Audrey: Let me answer with an anecdote. I grew up in a multilingual family, but I was mostly spoken to in French. The adults around me also spoke Dutch and another Belgian dialect, so whenever they didn’t want to include me in the conversation, they would switch to those languages. It frustrated me so much that I set out to learn them, just to finally understand what they were saying. From there, I kept picking up as many languages as I could while travelling, so I could always connect with the people I met. Looking back, I realize I did exactly the same thing in my scientific career: I wanted to be able to speak the languages of engineering, biology, chemistry and physics all at once.
That ability to cross the divide not only between fields of research, but also between cultures that aren’t used to working together has become a defining trait of how I do science. I have also always believed that collaboration is the best way to shape science, and that working toward a common goal is what brings innovations out of their shell and into people’s hands. For me, the most powerful way to do that was through entrepreneurship.
The realization came during my PhD, when I had to choose between continuing the main project I had been running for almost two years, or shifting my focus to a more recent side project — the one that would eventually become a start-up. The decision was hard, but the choice became easy once I asked myself a single question: which findings would reach people faster and truly change the game? I chose the project I was most passionate about — one that could give researchers in nanomedicine a disruptive new tool and accelerate the development of drug delivery systems. The challenge was (and is still) real, but it’s a path I have never regretted taking.
NanoSphere: Many promising RNA therapies fail not because of biology, but because production systems cannot keep pace. Where do you see the biggest disconnect today between formulation science and scalable manufacturing and how can the field close that gap? In nanomedicine, what technologies look sophisticated on paper but fail in practice, and where does simplicity become the real breakthrough?
Audrey: Having worked in biology, I can say with confidence that you can’t control everything there. Biological systems and human physiology are so complex that we are barely scratching the surface of how drugs actually work. The one thing you can control is how you make the drug. Many drugs fail to win regulatory approval not because of the biology, but because they can’t demonstrate enough consistency in their CMC processes. A tiny change in the process can significantly alter the properties of the drug, and therefore the biological response that follows. This is exactly why I believe the real game changer is a truly scalable process: one available from early discovery that can go all the way to large-scale production without changing a single thing. Same flow rate, same geometry, same formulation conditions, same nanoparticle.
Since the nanomedicine field (and RNA-LNPs in particular) is still fairly young compared with other scientific domains, I think it is too early to declare failure on projects or ideas that are simply running into obstacles. Take active targeting, for example: grafting antibodies or other ligands onto the surface of nanoparticles. So many strategies claim to be disruptive, yet none has reached the stage of a marketable product. To me, that is not a sign we should give up ! In fact, quite the opposite. It is a sign we should invest more energy into these challenges and look for creative, elegant solutions.
NanoSphere: If there’s one key message or insight you’d like to share with readers about the future of nanomedicine, what would it be?
Audrey: In biology, you can barely control anything. The one thing you can truly master is how you make the drug. The real breakthroughs won’t come from adding complexity, they’ll come from the elegance of doing something simple, reproducible, at every scale.