Surgery is a cornerstone in treatment of cancer. Approximately 80% of patients with cancer will receive surgical treatment once during their disease. In almost half of the patients’ cancer is recurring after the surgery due to incomplete tumour removal. The recurring of cancer leads to patient suffering and causes a huge financial burden on the healthcare system, and it can even cause death of the patient. There is a major unmet need to delineate cancer accurately, sparing healthy tissue, identifying local metastases, and aiding surgeons to precisely remove the entire tumour. FluoGuide develops FG001, a breakthrough, real-time, surgical visualisation solution that lights up cancer and improve surgical precision during surgery. FG001 is the first actively targeting fluorescent tumour marker in development that targets uPAR, a receptor extensively expressed in a wide range (>80%) of solid tumours such as brain (high grade glioma including glioblastoma (GBM)), lung, breast, colorectal and head and neck cancers. FluoGuide’s proprietary FG001 has the potential to revolutionise cancer surgery to improve the surgical outcome of >3 million cancer patients undergoing surgery every year.
To realise this huge potential, FluoGuide is working on accelerating the development of FG001. Our initial focus is on high grade glioma including GBM. This disease has poor survival rates, only half of the patients surviving 14 months on average. Moreover, surgical precision is extremely important as removing too much brain tissue can severely disable the patient. FG001 can thus enormously improve surgery of GBM patients. The funding from EIC accelerator pilot has accelerate and substantiate FG001’s clinical phase IIb/III study for GBM, and catapult FluoGuide to become a leader in cancer surgery guidance. We will generate revenues by 1) direct sales, paid for via reimbursement by insurance companies and governments, and 2) through partners, by a combination of revenue generated by selling finished products to partners for distribution to their customers and revenue generated by royalty paid by partners for having rights to our patent portfolio.
