On March 28th Sabrina Oliveira, Irati Beltrán Hernándeze and Sebas Pronk received an innovationvoucher by Utrecht Holdings.

We asked them how things are going.

1 Can you give a short summary of invention and voucher?

We developed a new, innovative anticancer treatment that comes with minimal side effects. We bring light-activatable drugs to the tumor using “nanobodies”: mini-antibodies that specifically recognize cancer cells. Then, we shine a harmless light on the cancer cells to specifically activate the light-activatable drugs that are in the tumor, making our treatment extremely specific because it doesn’t affect the healthy cells.

With the voucher, we wanted to do experiments to find out which of the three nanobodies we selected was the best one. The second part was about getting in contact and preparing manufacturing facilities to produce our medicine in larger scale. Now we can make our medicine on the lab bench, but later we need a factory to produce our medicine to lower the price and to make it widely available.

2 Can you provide an update on where you are now / are there any new results?

We have started talking to different manufacturing facilities and two of them will do a small trial to see if they can manufacture (part of) our medicine. Furthermore, we managed to choose one nanobody from the three we had before.

3 How has the voucher contributed to the next steps?

With the voucher we could pay for the experiments to test which nanobody performed better. Also, we did a professional study to find out how much medicine we need for testing in humans, how to go from lab scale to factory scale and which manufacturing companies could make our medicine.

4 How did Utrecht Holdings (the Business Developer) help you?

For the voucher, Danielle helped us in assessing which experiments and next steps could really help us in moving the project forwards. But before we obtained the voucher, Danielle joined us in the Venture Challenge, and helped us investigate what the market of our new medicine is, how many patients per country we could help and who would be eligible for our treatment. Also, the Utrecht Holdings is helping us with the patent application and is thinking actively along and giving us time, feedback and freedom make the patent application as good as possible.

5 Where do you want to be in two years?

Irati and I just obtained funding and a training program for two years to make impact with our research (Faculty of Impact), and thus to further develop our medicine. In two years, we will be at the end of the program, and we be able, financially and technically, to upscale the production of our medicine in a manufacturing organization. Plus, we want to have finished all the (animal) studies required to file for permission to use our medicine in humans. We need funding for that, so in two years we’d like to have acquired a large subsidy or an investment.

If you have any questions or want te know more about Lumox; please visit their website www.lumoxbiotech.com