PreComb Therapeutics secures CHF 2.2 Mio seed financing

The seed financing round of Precomb Therapeutics was led by Kinled Austria, the High-Tech Gründerfonds and FiveT Capital, in addition to participations from other investors. Patrick Aisher, managing partner at Kinled Austria, joined the company’s board of directors. The seed funding will help to advance the proprietary 3D3 Technology for patient-specific drug response analysis and position PreComb as a leader in point-of-care solutions to enable functional patient-specific drug testing directly in the clinic.

Despite recent advances in the development of novel cancer therapies, cancer remains the second largest cause of death after cardiac disease. Due to its inherent individual characteristics, personalized therapies have become a prime focus to provide patients with an optimal therapy. However, current patient-specific molecular and histopathological information is not sufficient to enable personalized medicine for most patients.

PreComb is developing the first point-of-care technology that enables clinical institutions to test a large number of therapies directly on 3D microtumors generated from patient tumors, complementing molecular and histopathological tumor classification. For the first time, a fully automated point-of-care solution for determining drug sensitivity or resistance directly in the clinic is being developed. The Swiss biotech company founded in 2018 by Jens M. Kelm (former CSO and CTO at InSphero), Peter Steiner (former Executive Director and Head of the Production & Processes department of ESBATech) and Olivier Mauti (former Head of Lab automation at ESBATech and Novartis/NIBR)

“In recent years, we have seen a change of dogma in the treatment of cancer away from empirically and statistics driven treatment decisions towards individualized therapy guidance. Molecular technologies have already paved the way in this direction. However, to achieve the full benefit of personalized medicine decisions for most patients, we need fully translatable testing platforms that directly assess individual drug sensitivity and resistance and can be implemented on-site in the clinic” said Jens M. Kelm, co-founder and CEO of PreComb. “This is a huge market opportunity for PreComb and we look forward to working with our new investors to begin a new chapter in the fight against cancer.”

“PreComb has built an exciting technology platform for personalized medicine that addresses important challenges for biopharmaceutical companies, but also aims to help physicians make better treatment decisions. We look forward to supporting PreComb to help cancer patients receive the most promising therapies and take advantage of the immense opportunities ahead" noted Patrick Aisher, Kinled Austria.

The founder team combines expertise in biomedicine, cell biology, bioinformatics and automation, and thus is ideally set-up to bring the promise of functional precision medicine to practice. We are excited to work with the team towards the realization of PreComb’s goals” said Anke Cassing, Principal at High-Tech Gründerfonds.