Our investment in CimCure

Cancer is leading to 12 million deaths per year - almost 40% of humans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point during their lifetimes. Although tremendous advances have been made in cancer therapy in the last decades, treatment remains a heavy burden and is increasingly expensive. 

CimCure co-founder Prof. Arjan Griffioen and his group have been researching tumour blood vessels extensively over the last 15 years. They found specific proteins present on such vessels that are not expressed anywhere else in the body. By creating antibodies that ingeniously target exactly these proteins, and testing these both on murine animal models as well as on dogs - CimCure has built confidence it may be on a path to develop low cost vaccine-based immunotherapies for tumours in humans. Recently, some of the research results which underlie CimCure’s innovation were published in Nature Communications

We know it is early days, and realise that clinical trials are often unforgiving. Yet we believe that backing CimCure exemplifies our thesis to invest at an early stage in outstanding scientists who would like to bring a potentially groundbreaking and impactful innovation to market.