EIT Health Catapult finalist Pan Cancer T secures €4M funding

Netherlands-based Pan Cancer T, an immunotherapy company developing the next generation of T cell therapeutics for hard-to-treat solid tumours, and EIT Health Catapult Finalist at this year’s health.tech conference in Munich, has successfully closed out a 4.25M Euro Seed Extension funding round.

Challenges faced by healthcare start-ups

Building a successful start-up is challenging for any founder, but building a successful healthcare start-up is even harder with the added regulatory hurdles they have to overcome to bring products to market to help patients in the safest way.  

Additionally, while the early stage investment landscape in Europe has accelerated over the last few years, there are still significant gaps when it comes to getting larger capital rounds for clinical translation.  

EIT Health Catapult 

EIT Health Catapult is a unique competition and training programme that fast-tracks Europe’s best life sciences and health tech start-ups and showcases them to leading experts and investors across Europe.  

Throughout the programme, start-ups receive intensive training in business modelling and planning, investment deal negotiation, and pitch preparation as they build their credibility and visibility through pan-European exposure, before pitching their service or product to international investors and world-leading companies. For investors, this means access to professionally prepared business cases from companies that have been de-risked. 

Each start-up in the programme is paired with a motivated mentor to help them refine their business plan and improve their pitch online. The Catapult programme’s mentors and Super Mentors comprise senior executives from renowned healthcare players and seasoned healthcare investors who provide individual consultancy to help their mentees gain a clearer understanding of aspects including increasing value for founders and investors, investor negotiations and termsheets, and exit scenarios.  

The programme has built a community of experts covering all relevant aspects for start-ups such as general strategy, commercial strategy, financing and financial strategy, go-to-market, product strategy, industrial partnerships, strategic planning, revenue forecasting, License negotiations, IP- and Company Valuations, regulatory, preclinical models, clinical trials etc. 

“The Super Mentor programme provides top management of candidate companies with a great opportunity for one-to-one mentoring in areas where they need support, not only in honing the pitch” said Roland Kozlowski, Executive Chariman of OncoTherics Limited and Super Mentor of the EIT Health Catapult Edition 8: “Rachel Abbott CEO of Pan Cancer T was a pleasure to work with; responsive and enthusiastic. Pan Cancer T’s closure of this financing round is a testament to the quality of the companies, and their management, which the Catapult programme attracts and will certainly enable the business to move up the value chain.” 

Pan Cancer T 

Pan Cancer T´s successful Seed Extension round brings their total funding to date to approximately 11M Euro, with continued support from their existing investors: Van Herk Ventures, Thuja Capital, Swanbridge Capital and Erasmus MC O&O Holding, plus support from a new investor, InnovationQuarter. 

This new funding will allow the company to create value by completing pre-clinical studies and progressing chemistry, manufacturing and control (CMC) activities for its lead product “PCT1:CO-STIM”. This TCR-T cell product features an IP-protected T cell receptor (TCR) highly specific for ROPN1, a novel tumour-restricted target strongly expressed in over 90% of patients with triple negative breast cancer and melanoma, and also incorporates a next generation modification to counteract the hostile tumour microenvironment, aiming to improve clinical response duration.  

Additionally, the funding will support Pan Cancer T’s progression of earlier-stage pipeline projects targeting colorectal and ovarian cancers and the development of a second next generation engineering approach. 

Rachel Abbott, CEO of Pan Cancer T, said: “Securing support from our new investor, InnovationQuarter, was critical to the successful closing of this latest financing round, which now enables us to advance our lead product toward the clinic, offering new hope for patients with triple negative breast cancer. Participating in the Catapult programme helped to prepare me for this process. My Super Mentor, Roland Kozlowski, provided a lot of useful advice regarding both my pitch and our company strategy more generally. Then, during the pitch training sessions, each of the five trainers provided different insights that I was able to pull together to further improve my pitch.” 

Become one of the next healthcare game-changers! 

Applications for the Catapult Programme’s next cohort are now open. 

Click here and apply to boost your healthcare start-up. 

Closing date: 29 August 2024