EIC Accelerator: Four projects awarded in March 2023 round

We are pleased to announce that in the March 2023 round of EIC Accelerator, Catalyze supported four successful applicants in preparing their submissions. The successful companies and clients of Catalyze include Magneto Systems (NL), STENTiT (NL), and PamGene (NL). In total, these companies were awarded €22.5 million in grants and equity – equivalent to 60% of the total funding amount awarded to Dutch applicants in this round. You can learn more about these exciting companies and their newly funded projects below.

Magneto

Magnetocaloric (MC) heat pumps can unlock sustainable heating and cooling by limiting GHG emissions. So far, nobody has been able to create a commercially sustainable product due to the high costs of magnetocaloric heat exchangers in need of rare-earth materials. For the first time, Magneto’s technology has, based on its patented composition of MC material, developed a heat pump using affordable and widely available non-rare earth materials, representing less than 1% of the costs of their competition. Magnetocaloric heat pumps can increase efficiency of heating and cooling by 30% with a longer lifespan and no contribution to global warming.

Magneto’s technology offers not only the lowest costs among their competition but also the widest application, offering solutions ranging from cryogenic cooling (-80*C) to high temperature heating ( to +200*C). With Magneto’s help, cooling and heating system manufacturers will be able to develop their own magnetocaloric heat pump around Magneto’s components and offer it to their customers. For them Magneto’s technology will represent a long awaited solution, which will free them from the burden of regulatory compliance, while saving electricity and money throughout its long lifespan.

With EIC support, Magneto will expand the current temperature span and run initial pilots in the commercial cooling sector by 2025. It will prove its product and business model, increase market attraction, and finally go to market by 2026.

Visit Magneto Systems’ website

STENTiT

Below-the knee critical limb ischemia (BTK-CLI) is the severe blockage of the arteries in the limb, leading to reduced blood flow. This condition currently affects over 5 million people in the EU and US. The current standard of care for BTK-CLI is balloon angioplasty. This treatment unfortunately has failed to show strong clinical outcomes: around 40% of patients suffer from procedural complications, 73% of the cases develop restenosis within 3 months, and 25% of patients end-up requiring minor or major limb amputations.

To tackle this, STENTiT has developed a first-in-class stent with regenerative capacity, a paradigm shift for the medical stent field. The Regenerative Stent is fully composed of nanofibers which allows for unique vascular restoration. The stent gradually dissolves while new vascular tissue is being formed, fully rebuilding the artery to secure long-term patency.

The €2.5M grant that STENTiT has won will be used to finalize the last safety studies and perform the FIH trial. The €10M equity component will be used to conduct a next-phase pivotal trial and prepare the Regenerative Stent for market launch.

Visit STENTiT’s website 

PamGene

Cancer is the second leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for over 10 million deaths in 2020. Although 7 Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors (ICI) are approved for different cancer indications and have represented a true breakthrough, only 10-50% of advanced cancer patients respond to the treatment. This unpredictability of results, together with 15-60% severe toxicity rates and high prices are restricting the impact potential of ICIs. Predicting ICI response is critical for fully realizing their potential in treating early-stage tumours and enhancing ICI treatment regimens.

PamGene’s IOpener is a ground-breaking in-vitro diagnostics blood-based testing platform for ICI response prediction. Made possible by PamGene’s proprietary microarray-based kinase activity profiling of host immune cells, it can predict a patient’s response before ICI therapy is started from a simple blood draw. The IOpener aims to revolutionize the precision-medicine sector, enabling the widespread use of ICIs at any cancer stage.

The EIC Accelerator will allow PamGene to fully develop the IOpener platform into a tumour-agnostic platform combining new data types (multi-omics biomarkers) and improved performance. Furthermore, the EIC Equity will enable PamGene to expand the clinical validation studies of the IOpener platform, performing prospective clinical validation  and feasibility studies.

Visit PamGene’s website 

Read the press release and LinkedIn post

For more information regarding PamGene, contact Rinie van Beuningen, Vice President Business Development – iopener@pamgene.com – +31 (0) 73 615 80 80.