Dr. Adèle James spent years studying how bacteria evolve, resist, and kill. By 2021, she had a doctorate in molecular microbiology from Sorbonne Université, time at MIT as a visiting researcher, and a clear read on a problem the research world kept describing but not solving: antibiotics were failing, and nothing credible was replacing them.
So she stopped publishing and started building.
Scientist Turned Founder:
After finishing her PhD, James worked as a research scientist at BIOMILLENIA and then as an applications specialist in microbiology at Bruker Daltonics. She was deep in applied science, but not yet building at scale.
The pivot came when she met Alexandros Pantalis at a Paris incubator designed to pair technical founders with business founders. That meeting became Phagos. James took the CTO seat. Her job was to turn years of microbiology into something deployable.
The Alphagos Platform:
The core product is Alphagos, Phagos’s proprietary AI platform. It combines microbiology and artificial intelligence to identify and design phages that specifically target harmful bacteria such as Salmonella, E. coli, and Enterococcus cecorum. Phages are viruses that attack bacteria and nothing else, which makes them precise in a way antibiotics never were.
The speed is the real proof point. “Using bacteriophages and AI makes us able to develop a new cure in two months from scratch,” says James. “This is a 100 times improvement over traditional antibiotic development.”
A Regulatory First:
Phagos became the first company authorised to market personalised phage-based veterinary drugs in the European Union, a milestone that no company had reached before. That kind of regulatory clearance does not happen on the back of a good pitch deck. It takes verified science.
More than 10 clinical trials supported the deployment, and over half a million animals in France have already been treated. The therapy runs across chicken, cattle, swine, and shrimp farming today.
Phagos Goes Global:
In October 2025, the BioTech startup Phagos raised €25 million in a Series A co-led by CapAgro, Hoxton Ventures, CapHorn, and Demeter, with Entrepreneur First, Station F, and others also participating.
The funding is going toward expanding veterinary deployments, developing the next generation of the AI discovery platform, and scaling internationally across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Human health applications are on the roadmap for 2030. In early 2026, Phagos also won the Santé Tech For Future prize from La Tribune and BFM Business.
What Adèle James Built:
The team is now 50 people, with 90% coming from scientific and technical backgrounds across microbiology, computer science, data, and AI. James built that from a standing start in four years.
Her message to scientists has been consistent: don’t just publish the solution, build it. For founders working at the edge of science and software, that tension is exactly what makes her profile worth studying.
