EIT Health-backed cancer therapy firm Peptomyc receives €4.2 million in financing

VC fund Alta Life Sciences Spain I FCR heads consortium of investors

Peptomyc, a cancer therapy start-up supported by EIT Health, announced the closure of €4.2 million in new Series A financing in mid-September.

A consortium led by Alta Life Sciences Spain I FCR, a Barcelona-based venture capital fund, has provided the new financing, as well as additional knowhow. According to the Peptomyc website: “This investment provides the capital necessary to significantly advance the industrial CMC manufacturing of our peptides and their validation.”

Peptomyc S.L. is developing a new, first-in-class, cancer therapy using innovative anti-Myc peptides. Myc is an oncogene deregulated in the majority of human cancers, making Peptomyc’s products potentially applicable to all cancer patients. These products are recombinant cell-penetrating peptides based on Omomyc, the best Myc inhibitor known to date. Omomyc has proven to be effective against several types of tumors independently of their mutational status, without evidence of any resistance to it even after long term treatment, and causing only very mild and reversible side effects in normal tissues.

‘A long journey’

Dr. Laura Soucek, Peptomyc founder and CEO, said the road from starting up in 2014 to this point has “been a long journey, I must say, and not always easy. I think I learnt not to get discouraged by the first ‘no’s and benefit from any feedback I received along the way, especially the negative ones, which helped me to improve and strengthen our project to make it more ‘bullet-proof'”.

EIT Health has been a part of the start-up’s journey. Peptomyc competed in the finals of the Business Plan Aggregator at the 2016 EIT Health in Barcelona, and won third place in the Biotech category. That prize came with a €4,533 grant and the kind of recognition that let Peptomyc meet potential investors and gain entry into other competitions and platforms for attaining recognition. EIT Health has also supported promotion of Peptomyc with the international press.

Peptomyc, which currently consists of a core team of five women, represents a step toward Soucek’s effort to realise her childhood dream. “I dreamt of becoming some sort of scientist,” she said, “and being able to make a difference to the world. I reached the first goal, now I am working a little more on the second one!”

Find out more about Peptomyc here, or on their website.

In the photo above, Peptomyc CEO Dr. Laura Soucek shows off her award at the 2016 Summit, flanked by Marco Pugliese, Managing Director EIT Health Spain, and Anaïs González, Innovation Manager at EIT Health Spain.