Our team is incredibly proud to share that we have been awarded a BRIDGE Discovery grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and Innosuisse. This highly competitive funding supports bold, high-impact projects that have the potential to transform scientific discoveries into future therapies — and we’re honored that our work has been selected.
What problem are we trying to solve?
Treating aggressive solid tumors, such as glioblastoma, remains one of the greatest challenges in medicine. Today’s treatments — surgery, radiation, chemotherapy — can help, but survival outcomes have barely improved in decades.
A promising new class of treatments, CAR-T cell therapy, has shown remarkable success in blood cancers. But in solid tumors, CAR-T cells face a hostile and complex environment that prevents them from working effectively. Tumors can hide behind multiple “masks,” suppress the immune response around them, and evolve to escape single-target therapies.
In short: the tools we have today are not enough — we need smarter, stronger, and more adaptable immune therapies.
What will this funding allow us to do?
Thanks to the BRIDGE Discovery support, we will develop a new generation of engineered immune cells designed specifically to tackle the hardest-to-treat solid tumors.
Here’s the big idea in simple terms:
1. Smarter targeting of tumors
Tumors like glioblastoma are extremely diverse — no single target fits all.
Our engineered CAR-T cells will recognize multiple tumor markers at once (including EGFRvIII, IL-13Rα2, B7-H3, and FAP).
More targets = fewer places for the tumor to hide.
2. Rewriting the tumor’s “neighborhood”
Solid tumors build an immunosuppressive microenvironment — a kind of protective bubble that keeps immune cells out.
We are programming our CAR-T cells to secrete special molecules that reshape this environment, making it easier for the immune system to attack the tumor.
These molecules are designed to:
boost helpful immune responses (e.g., by activating macrophages),
block the tumor’s suppressive signals,
and improve the CAR-T cells’ ability to survive and function inside the tumor.
3. Preparing for real-world clinical use
A key goal of this project is to advance the technology toward GMP-compliant production, bringing us significantly closer to future clinical translation.
In other words: this grant doesn’t just support scientific exploration — it helps move a promising therapy toward eventually reaching patients.
Why this matters
If successful, our approach would represent a major step forward in the treatment of glioblastoma and other solid tumors, offering:
more durable responses,
fewer escape mechanisms for cancer,
and a therapy designed to work with — not against — the complexity of real tumors.
We are deeply grateful to SNSF and Innosuisse for recognizing this vision and supporting our efforts. And we’re excited to get to work.
