The financing of the Dutch life sciences company is supported by the European Commission under its InvestEU programme. Lumicks aims to impact more than one million lives by 2027.
The European Investment Bank (EIB) has signed a €20m venture debt agreement with Amsterdam-based Lumicks to speed up the development and launch of its new product, which could optimise cancer therapies faster and with greater accuracy, it says.
Lumicks’ next generation high-throughput cell avidity platform was designed to advance immunotherapy development for cancer research. The new technology addresses a key challenge in the fight against cancer: the lack of tools to directly measure the binding interaction of immune cells, such as CAR-T cells, with cancer cells, which can slow therapy development.
Cell avidity analysis allows scientists to quickly identify the cell that recognises, binds to, and ultimately attacks tumor cells. These more accurate measurements could speed up drug development.
“By providing deeper insights into cellular interactions, our instruments empower researchers to make faster, better-informed decisions, with the goal of improving success rates in clinical trials and accelerating the development of effective therapies,” said Hugo de Wit, chief executive officer of Lumicks.
Healthcare innovation
The European funding will enable Lumicks to “accelerate our R&D timeline, ensuring we continue innovating to deliver a long-lasting impact in the immunotherapy space”, De Wit said.
The investment is supported by the European Commission through its InvestEU initiative, which is focused on innovation and job creation in Europe.
“The Netherlands is home to a vibrant life sciences industry and the EIB has been proudly supporting this sector to ensure it continues to lead in medical innovation and transformative healthcare solutions,” said EIB vice president Robert de Groot.
With the backing of InvestEU, the EIB “can provide Lumicks with stable long-term funding matching the highly innovative profile of the company and tailored to its current needs for continued growth, market expansion, and development of its technologies” De Groot said.
Since filing its first patent in 2013, Lumicks has grown into a global firm, employing 170 people worldwide. The life sciences firm, which raised $93m (€85.3m) from investors in 2021, aims to impact more than one million lives by 2027 through its technologies in both dynamic single-molecule and cell avidity analysis.
