Catherine Larue Wants to Build the Bridges Between Lab Research and the Health Industry

Catherine Larue has spent a career standing in the gap between two worlds that rarely speak the same language. On one side sit the academic laboratories where medical discoveries are born, and on the other the companies that turn those discoveries into products patients can actually use. Bridging that divide has become her mission, and it is the idea behind CoDx, the biotechnology consultancy she founded after years running one of Luxembourg's most important research institutions.

Her conviction is blunt. Such gateways between industry and academia are missing, and I believe in building them, she says. Through CoDx she now helps foundations, research institutes, and small and medium companies make the hard journey from a promising idea to a finished product, a passage where many good concepts stall for want of money, know how, or a partner who understands both the science and the market.

From the pharmaceutical lab to the biobank

Larue came to that role through an unusual mix of training. She holds a doctorate in immunology and an executive MBA, a combination of deep science and business discipline that few people carry at once. She spent years in the pharmaceutical industry, and for more than six of them she led the Integrated BioBank of Luxembourg, known as IBBL, an institution built to collect and manage the biological samples and data that modern medical research depends on.

The experience that seems to have shaped her most came early, when she worked on the discovery of a new blood biomarker meant to speed the diagnosis of heart attacks. The project fought against tight budgets and took seven years to reach the market, but once it did it changed the way heart attacks are managed around the world, an impact she says persists to this day. It was a lesson in patience, and in how long the road from bench to bedside can be.

Where health innovation is stuck

Larue is clear eyed about the obstacles facing the field she has devoted herself to. She points to the dizzying pace of new technology and artificial intelligence, to the thorny questions around data privacy, and to the shortage of effective treatments for certain diseases and the most aggressive cancers. She also argues that the industry has to find ways to make drug development faster and cheaper, to lean less on animal testing before human trials, and to build better tools for translating lab results into real therapies, including human organoids grown to mimic actual tissue.

For all her enthusiasm about new tools, she resists the idea that technology alone will solve these problems. When it comes to innovation, specific tasks still require the expertise and creativity of humans, she says. Successfully addressing these challenges means combining the power of technology with human insight to deliver better outcomes for patients. It is a characteristic stance from someone whose entire career has been about connecting things that work better together than apart.

That belief, that progress in health comes from linking people and institutions rather than leaving them to work in isolation, runs through everything she does. Whether steering a national biobank or advising a fledgling startup, Larue keeps building the same thing, a set of bridges sturdy enough to carry an idea all the way from the research bench to the patients who need it.