On your right is Debiopharm, and it tells a very Lausanne kind of story: not conquest, not spectacle, but rescue. This city has grown unusually good at spotting reinvented ideas, especially in science, where something dismissed elsewhere can come back wearing a white lab coat and save lives. Not a bad second act.
Debiopharm began in nineteen seventy-nine with a plan so lean it almost sounds improvised. Rolland-Yves Mauvernay founded the company in Martigny, and later liked to say he started it “in a garage” after leaving France and arriving with five collaborators. His advice to young founders was wonderfully blunt: “Osez!”... dare.
What exactly did he dare? He built a business around finding drug candidates that other people had abandoned, taking over the rights, developing them properly, and then licensing them out again. In plain English: Debiopharm made a habit of looking at rejected possibilities and asking, “Are we sure this is finished?” Science, at its best, can be gloriously stubborn.
Two examples changed the company’s fate. In nineteen eighty-two, Debiopharm acquired the rights to develop triptorelin from Tulane University. It later became an important treatment for conditions including advanced prostate cancer and endometriosis. Then, in nineteen eighty-nine, the company licensed oxaliplatin from Nagoya City University. That drug went on to become a standard treatment for metastatic colorectal cancer. Both medicines later reached the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines. So yes, some of the world’s most useful therapies started as somebody else’s castoffs. There’s your hidden afterlife.
This Lausanne site matters too. Since two thousand and four, Debiopharm has based its headquarters here in a former office building first designed by architect Jean Tschumi for André and Company, a trading giant. The building later took the name Après-demain Forum - “the day after tomorrow,” which is almost absurdly on brand. Mauvernay wanted the company close to the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and the university hospital, where science, talent, and clinical care could keep rubbing shoulders.
The company grew from two people into a Swiss biotech success story with more than four hundred employees from over forty nationalities across Lausanne and Martigny. Even now, it still works in that partnership style: universities, research groups, other firms, all pushing half-finished ideas toward usable medicine. In Martigny, Debiopharm kept expanding production and research; in Lausanne, it kept refining the headquarters and planning a new building aimed at more flexible work and lower-carbon operation. Quiet ambition... very Swiss, with fewer cowbells.
After Mauvernay died in twenty seventeen, Debiopharm emphasized his curiosity, his humanitarian streak, and the succession he had prepared by bringing his son Thierry into leadership. That feels fitting here. Not just inheritance of money or status, but inheritance of unfinished work.
And that may be the larger point of this stop: cities reinvent themselves the way laboratories do, by testing what still has life in it.
From here, we head toward the Federal Supreme Court, about a twelve-minute walk away, where trust turns into something sterner: judgment. If you’re curious, Debiopharm generally keeps weekday hours from eight to six and closes on weekends.
