There is a moment in almost every remarkable career when something shifts. Not a dramatic revelation, not a headline-worthy event, but a quiet, almost inconvenient recognition that a problem exists, that it matters, and that you are exactly the person who can help to address it. For Jørund Sollid, CEO of Immuvera Therapeutics AS, that moment arrived when he encountered one of the more quietly devastating paradoxes in modern medicine.
Dogs develop spontaneous cancers that closely mirror the biology of human malignancies. Not in the way laboratory animals are induced to develop tumors, but genuinely and unpredictably, shaped by environment, genetics, and the ordinary arc of a living body. And yet, the veterinary oncology toolbox, for all intents and purposes, is nearly empty. Treatment options in veterinary oncology remain very limited.
“It is the kind of gap that, once you see it, you cannot unsee”, Jørund says.
A Career Built at the Intersection of Science and Strategy
Jørund’s path began with a PhD in physiology and molecular biosciences, a foundation that gave him not only scientific fluency but a lasting respect for what science actually demands. He speaks about that training the way people speak about formative experiences: with gratitude and precision. But it was his time in Roche, one of the world’s foremost pharmaceutical companies, that taught him something the laboratory could not.
“Working in oncology at Roche taught me that great science does not automatically lead to great medical impact and how much the journey from science to patient impact also depends on strategy, partnerships, and execution,” he reflects.
That insight stayed with him. Over time, he took on broader roles across companies such as Mundipharma, Servier, and Lytix Biopharma. Step by step, his career moved from a scientific starting point into senior leadership and C-suite roles, where the responsibility is not only to understand the science but to build teams, shape direction, create partnerships, and turn opportunity into something a company can actually deliver.
Twenty years of that kind of work leaves a person with a particular set of instincts: how to read a room, how to build a deal, how to translate something almost impossibly complex into language that a board, an investor, or a regulatory body can act upon.
It also, as it turns out, leaves you alert to paradoxes.
The Paradox That Became a Purpose
The companion-animal oncology space is, in Jørund’s estimation, sitting on an extraordinary opportunity hiding in plain sight.
Dogs develop spontaneous cancers that in many ways resemble human disease. These are naturally occurring cancers, shaped by genetics, age, and environment, not artificially induced models. At the same time, treatment options in veterinary oncology are still limited, especially for advanced disease. That gap has become more visible as dogs live longer and owners are increasingly willing to invest in care.
“I saw the chance to address a real and growing unmet need for dogs while creating translational insights that may matter for human medicine,” Jørund says. “That is what made me say yes to Immuvera Therapeutics.”
The company’s focus is deliberately narrow: advancing Nebumet through a disciplined development path grounded in a clear scientific rationale.
Breathing New Life Into the Toolbox
At the core of what Immuvera Therapeutics AS is building is Nebumet, an inhaled immunotherapy designed to target pulmonary metastases in dogs.
Pulmonary metastases, the spread of cancer to the lungs, represent one of the most lethal events in canine cancer. The lungs are, in many cancer trajectories, where the story often ends. Immuvera’s approach is to intervene at exactly that point, delivering therapy through an inhaled approach intended to activate a local immune response in the lungs, where metastatic disease often develops.
The tolerability profile is designed to be favourable. That is a deliberate and fundamental choice, a departure from the chemotherapy model that most owners and many veterinarians have come to assume is the only available framework.
The programme has already moved beyond theory and is advancing toward its next regulatory development phase in Europe. The company has established preclinical proof-of-principle, constructed the regulatory and GMP manufacturing foundation required for its next development stage, and designed two randomised proof-of-concept studies targeting oral malignant melanoma and osteosarcoma. The company has also secured early patent protection.
For an early-stage biotech operating in an underserved space, this represents systematic and disciplined de-risking. A promising idea, carefully turned into a real therapeutic programme.
An Early Signal Worth Noticing
Sollid is careful when he talks about early results. He does not overstate what individual cases can mean. But he also does not dismiss the importance of early signals when they support the underlying biological rationale.
A dog with stage IV melanoma. High metastatic burden. The anticipated survival with chemotherapy is roughly 60 days. The dog received six treatments of Immuvera’s inhaled immunotherapy. Several lesions showed measurable reduction. The dog remained alive for more than 180 days while maintaining a good quality of life during treatment. He is deliberate about how he frames it.
“It is a single case, and I am careful not to overstate it,” he says. “But it supported the underlying biological rationale.”
That restraint is itself a form of credibility. In a field where hope is frequently traded as currency, Jørund insists on dealing in evidence. He will tell you what this case means, and he will tell you what it does not mean, and he will offer both with equal clarity. The biology is translating. That is the sentence that matters.
Challenging Established Assumptions
One of the less visible but profoundly important things that Immuvera is doing has nothing to do with inhalers or immune responses. It has to do with assumptions. Two misconceptions, Jørund explains, persist in the world of companion-animal oncology with remarkable stubbornness.
The first: that once cancer has spread, nothing realistic remains to be done. He acknowledges that this belief did not emerge from nowhere. Historically, it has been close to true, and it leads owners, and sometimes veterinarians, to default to palliative care earlier than the situation may require.
The second: that advanced therapy means heavy side effects. Most owners have encountered chemotherapy, or the concept of it, and carry the assumption that any serious treatment must come at a serious cost to the animal’s quality of life.
“Immuvera is challenging both assumptions,” Jørund says.
The early treated cases show dogs maintaining a very good quality of life throughout the treatment process. The protocol is designed to be minimally disruptive: short sessions, a defined schedule, and no prolonged infusion visits.
For Sollid, this matters not just clinically, but practically. In veterinary medicine, treatment decisions are not made in isolation. They affect the animal, the veterinarian, and the family around the animal. That is why usability and tolerability are not secondary considerations. They are part of what makes a treatment meaningful in the first place.
Starting With the Owner’s Perspective
When asked to describe what the journey looks like for a pet owner whose dog has just received a cancer diagnosis, Jørund does not begin with science. He begins with empathy.
“A cancer diagnosis is overwhelming,” he says. “For me, that journey starts with empathy and clarity, helping the owner understand the disease, the treatment goal, and what the process will feel like for their dog.”
The veterinarian assesses candidacy and integrates the treatment into the broader care plan. The protocol does the rest: short sessions, a defined rhythm, no prolonged infusion visits. The goal is not to make a difficult situation feel easy. It is to make it understandable and manageable. For many families, that in itself can make a real difference.
A Leader Tested
Leadership in biotech is easy to describe in theory. It is considerably harder to sustain under pressure, across cultures, and inside organisations of various sizes.
Jørund’s most revealing leadership story comes from his time at Servier, the global pharmaceutical company headquartered in France. He arrived there carrying the habits and expectations of Norwegian professional culture: flat, consensus-driven, informal. The organisation he walked into was, by comparison, hierarchical and siloed. He was advised to adapt.
“I did, to a degree,” he says. “You have to respect the organisation you join.”
But he made a deliberate decision that adaptation had to travel in both directions. He was leading large cross-functional meetings with ten to twelve specialists, each confident of their expertise and accustomed to defending it. He made it a lived standard, not a stated principle but a daily practice, that every voice would be heard and every contribution treated with equal respect, regardless of title or seniority.
“It took time,” he recalls. “But gradually those meetings became environments where people genuinely collaborated rather than defended territory.”
What mattered most to him was not a formal performance metric. It was hearing from colleagues across departments that they felt safe and heard in the projects he led.
“That meant more to me than any deal milestone,” he says.
That experience helped confirm his view that strong leadership is often visible in the everyday quality of collaboration. It is not mainly about style or rhetoric. It is about whether people trust each other, contribute openly, and move in the same direction.
The Man Outside the Office
It would be easy to assume that running a frontier biotech company in an underserved category leaves little room for anything else. Jørund suggests otherwise.
“I find genuine renewal in the outdoors,” he says, with the ease of someone describing a real and practiced habit rather than an aspiration. “I am very stereotypical Norwegian,” he says. Nature, he explains, quiets the noise. Some of his best ideas arrive when he is in it.
And then there are his two teenagers.
“I am at my calmest when they are around,” he says. “The love you have for your children is unconditional in a way that nothing else quite matches. It puts everything into perspective. Many dog owners know a version of that same bond, a deep loyalty, closeness, and trust over many years. That is why serious illness in a dog can be so emotionally difficult for a family.”
Vision Opens Doors. Credibility Keeps Them Open.
Jørund is the kind of leader who has spent real time thinking about what it means to lead, not as a performance but as a practice earned through years of doing it. He draws on Stephen M.R. Covey’s formulation with the comfort of someone who has tested it in the field: trust is equal parts character and competence, and every leadership failure is ultimately a failure of one or the other.
“You cannot build trust on good intentions alone,” he says. “You need to show that the science holds up, that milestones are met, and that the team delivers what it promises.”
His philosophy distills to five qualities he returns to with consistency: transparent, focused, factual, kind, and above all, trustworthy in execution.
“Vision opens doors,” he says, “but credibility is what keeps them open.”
In biotech, where the gap between promise and proof is wide, and the consequences of crossing it carelessly are real, that distinction carries weight. Sollid’s view is that long-term value is built in a different way: by being clear about what is known, honest about what remains to be proven, and disciplined in how the company moves forward.
Jørund believes, with the conviction of someone who has spent twenty years watching great science fail and modest science succeed based almost entirely on how it was managed and carried out, that meaningful innovation starts by taking an overlooked problem seriously.
“Where others see an underserved space,” he says, “we see a category waiting to be built.”
That is the ambition behind Immuvera Therapeutics AS: to develop a new treatment option in an area where there are still too few, and to do it in a way that is scientifically grounded, clinically relevant, and realistic in practice.
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Read More: Leaders Advancing Veterinary Immunotherapy & Biotech Innovation 2026
