The story of InCephalo: How a Swiss company, supported by an EU funding programme, is fighting brain cancer globally.
Like many stories of great success, the journey of Carlo Bertozzi and his company InCephalo, currently rewarded with the prestigious EIT Health Gold Track, started with a stroke of fate. During his first steps as an entrepreneur, just after his PhD at the University of Zurich, he received a lot of support and help from more experienced colleagues and scientists and then, as he remembers, “one mentor who was very influential in my entrepreneurial journey was diagnosed and unfortunately, later on, died because of a brain tumour”. This experience sparked Bertozzi’s wish to contribute to new therapy methods for brain cancer. For the first time, the idea to found InCephalo popped up in 2014 at an entrepreneurial seminar financed by the predecessor organisation of Innosuisse, the Swiss Agency for Innovation, where Bertozzi first met InCephalo’s current CSO, Johannes vom Berg. Ever since, they have been expanding their network in the field of brain cancer all over the world because, as brain cancer is such a particular field, it needs global expertise and worldwide scientific cooperation to find an effective treatment. But why is it so difficult to treat brain cancer?
Bertozzi explains that the general problem with disease treatments in the brain is that the brain is very protective and shielded, making it very hard for drugs to enter. Sometimes only a rate of 0.1% of the medications enter the brain, and this rate is particularly low for potent anti-cancer antibodies. Hence, vast doses of medications are needed to treat brain cancer, of which up to 99.9% do not even enter the brain and can do more harm to the rest of the body. To achieve higher local concentration, neurosurgeons can deliver drugs directly into the brain tumour, all with the aim to increase its impact. However, these drugs are not designed to be placed locally at the tumour. They defuse quickly and don’t stay long enough at the tumour; even worse, they often accumulate in the body, increasing the chance of severe side effects. The new approach of InCephalo is to protein engineer / modify promising or marketed drugs that stay long enough at the tumour to have an impact and, once they diffuse away, are rapidly degraded. Their Compartment Lock technology, called C-Lock, allows tailor-made molecules for local administration and can be applied to antibodies and similar biological drug formats. InCephalo’s technology has already been applied to a promising anti-cancer cytokine called IL-12. A potent anti-cancer therapy with severe, even deadly, side effects. This first asset, InC01, has already shown proof of concept in animal models and primary disease tissue. Hence, they tested InC01 in patient-derived brain tumour samples, which proved the drug candidate’s impact in an experimental setting. Based on these results, they were awarded orphan designation by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), a status assigned to a medicine intended for use against a rare condition that is life-threatening or chronically debilitating. The company plans to bring this first asset (InC01) to the clinics within the next two years. To plan and execute the corresponding clinical trials, the company hired a renowned brain cancer specialist, Lauren Abrey, MD.
To further develop their drugs, lay the ground for further development and bring their medications to market, InCephalo applied for the EIT Health Gold Track. The Gold Track is a programme of EIT Health and aims to accelerate the growth of massively scalable healthcare companies by pairing them with top-flight life science advisors. After passing the selection process, the companies receive a lead coach and strategic advisor who serves them as advisors and discusses the company’s progress monthly. Additionally, the selected companies get access to some of the best experts in their fields in the EU and the US. These feedback rounds are enormously valuable but sometimes also painful. To give an example, Bertozzi asks us to “imagine you spend weeks and months working on your project and then the experts say, why don’t you go in another direction?”. But these different angles and perspectives allow you to grow your company vision and solidify your case. For him, the EIT Gold Track was a great experience, as “it helped to see the things beyond the technique you normally focus on and to explore the full value creation process”. Even though the EIT Gold Track is very competitive, with a final success rate of only 3%, Bertozzi never had the experience that Swiss companies had any disadvantages.
InCephalo cooperates closely with other European companies as they cannot do all experiments in-house and they must outsource some required services to create the molecules for the company’s next steps. Now, for example, they applied together with the Dutch bioinformatics company Omnigen and the University Hospital Basel for a Eurostar project. The idea behind this cooperation is that brain tumour tissue that will be removed during surgeries at the University Hospital in Basel will be treated outside the patient with the new medication of InCephalo. Then the Dutch collaborator, Omnigen, analyses its influence on the cells. Through this cooperation, InCephalo can learn more about the reaction of future patients to the molecule, leading to more efficient clinical trials. Bertozzi is sure that InCephalo will build on cooperations like this in the long term as “brain cancer is, unfortunately, a global phenomenon”.
After successfully passing the EIT Gold Track, InCephalo received its Grant funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI). This direct funding by SERI is part of the transitional measures for Horizon Europe, as Switzerland is currently treated as a non-associated third country in the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. While this additional step seems to be a time-consuming hurdle at first glance, Bertozzi experienced it as “super-efficient” and states that he “was amazed how pragmatic and efficient the process went”. During the process, he never had the impression that there were further hurdles but that everyone aimed to distribute the Grant as uncomplicated and fast as possible. However, when it comes to further funding opportunities, sometimes one is a bit jealous of the EU competition, as there are many more funding possibilities, such as the EIT Wild Card or the EIC Accelerator, that even includes an equity financing component by the EIC fund. At the same time, Bertozzi says that “Switzerland is very competitive with its excellent pool of talents”, from which companies like his are profiting.
In general, for Bertozzi, people make the difference. He sees InCephalo’s A-team of experts and the support of leading neurosurgeons from Europe and beyond as one of his greatest achievements. In his opinion, there is “no bigger reward than if you can bring an excellent team together whose work convinces clinicians, that see patients every day, that you could make a difference and help them”. Motivated by such achievements, Carlo Bertozzi will continue to drive InCephalo further and work for his vision to cure brain cancer. Asked what he would like to pass on to people inspired by his story and thinking about starting a company themselves, he replies: “go out, talk to people, and share your ideas; you can only gain”. Because, in the end, it is all about cooperation.