With radiotherapy en vogue, Belgian startup nabs nearly $42M in Series A funding
Interest in targeted radiation treatments was buoyed last month with Novartis’ $NVS $2.1 billion bet on Endocyte that put the spotlight on a decades-old class of drugs in the lucrative field of oncology. Belgian radiotherapy developer Camel-IDS has cashed in on the renewed enthusiasm with a €37 million (about $42 million) Series A round, led by V-Bio Ventures and Gimv.
The company, which was spun off Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and incorporated in 2014, develops novel radiopharmaceuticals using single domain antibody fragments derived from camelids — a family of mammals that includes camels and llamas — labeled with radioisotopes. In this class of drugs, the radioactive agent is taken up in the cancerous tumor and the radioactive toxins are specifically targeted to destroy the affected tissue, versus chemotherapy, which does not discriminate between mutated tissue and healthy cells.
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