TC Biopharm gets €4m Horizon2020 grant

TC Biopharm Ltd. (TCB) gets a €4m funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. TCB will progress its gamma-delta T-Cell therapy (GDT) for the treatment of multiple tumour types. The first-generation of its GDT platform is an autologous cell therapy, which uses the patient’s own cells to treat various tumour types. The company has ongoing phase II/III trials in skin, lung and kidney cancers. With the grant, TC Biopharm wants to manufacture allogeneic cell banks and develop a next-generation allogeneic off-the-shelf approach. First cancer patients should be treated in 2019. „I am excited at the prospect of combining allogeneic GDT cell therapy with our existing CAR platform; this will allow us to develop the next generation of safe, cost-effective immunotherapy for cancer, states Artin Moussavi, Chief Business Officer at TCB. According to the company, off-the-shelf approaches have significant advantages over existing autologous treatments. Larger target populations of cancer sufferers could be treated with a more reproducible product, which has been campaign-manufactured. That would keep treatment costs much lower. However, the development process is more complex to ensure the cells are acceptable to a broader patient base.

The grant is the largest funding a UK company has ever received from a European scheme for the development of a healthcare therapeutic product. The funding will come from the SME instrument, which is considered to be the most competitive Horizon 2020 funding programme. This summer, out of 1.514 applications, only 57 projects were selected.