Meet Asgard Therapeutics, a Swedish biotech scale-up, and EIC Scaling Club New Biotech Platforms group member. Using the company's own words, Asgard Therapeutics is “exploring direct cell reprogramming technologies to develop ground-breaking cancer immunotherapies”. 

During the Scale 100 Forum in Athens, Greece, we met with Fabio Rosa, the co-founder and head of Asgard's research team, to learn more about the company and its fantastic work in cancer treatment. 

Read the article below or listen to the interview here: 

Turning enemies into allies

Born as a spinoff of Lund University in the south of Sweden, Asgard focuses on developing a novel type of cancer therapy to revolutionise how solid tumors are currently treated. “Our therapy is called AT-108, and it, in a very simplified way, converts cancer cells - the bad guys, into a particular type of immune cells from our blood that we call type one dendritic cells - the good guys.” Fabio explains. 

As a result of the AT-108 therapy mechanism, cancer cells induce an immune response against themselves. Fabio adds that the therapy is both personalised and off-the-shelf, meaning it can be administered to different patients and types of solid tumors. 

Asgard Therapeutics was founded in 2018 by three scientific co-founders – Fabio, the current CEO Cristiana Pires, and Filipe Pereira, Professor at Lund University and Asgard’s Head of Innovation. Since 2018, Asgard has been mainly focused on the preclinical development of the AT-108 therapy program. 

Since its founding, Asgard has secured more than €6M in non-dilutive funding or grants (up from €2M raised at the time of filming the video interview), trying to take the maximum possible advantage of European funding. The company is also an EIC beneficiary, having received support from EIC. In 2021, the company closed a seed round investment of €6M, co-led by three investors – Novo Holdings, Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, and Industrifonden.

In March 2024, the scale-up closed its Series A round of €30M, co-led by Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JJDC, Inc., and RV Invest, with participation from Agard’s existing investors. The goal of the latest round was to take the scale-up to the final inflection point – bringing the AT-108 therapy into clinics, which is predicted to happen in Q1 of 2027. 

Asked whether the company is seeking additional funding, Fabio says that Asgard’s current priority is looking for partners to advance its therapy program. However, Asgard is also bridging its network to additional investors – particularly corporate investors. “Right now, we are maturing the relationships so that when the time comes to start raising money, we have the relationship established to make it happen,” Fabio says, adding that the next fundraising for the company will start in 2025. 

A deep dive into Asgard's team and strategy

Behind Asgard Therapeutics is a technology-driven team focused on its development. The company is headquartered in Lund, Sweden, and has 14 full-time employees. Additionally, Asgard has a network of experienced advisors to help the company with drug development, finances, and business growth. Fabio says the strong interaction between the core team and the advisors is undoubtedly the driving force behind the company's progress.

Fabio is sure that the reason for the company’s success is the combination of the scientific quality and technological drive: “We value high-impact publications supporting our scientific quality. And that's a key value proposition we've consistently upheld.” So far, Asgard has had three publications in the Science Immunology journal and one, most recent, in the prestigious Science. 

Fabio adds that the company closed the Series A round due to the significant progress made during the seed round. One of the key milestones was generating in vivo proof-of-concept for the AT-108 therapy program. The next step is to advance the therapy into human clinical trials.

Another significant milestone for Asgard was having the company’s regulatory path approved by a national regulatory agency in Europe. According to Fabio, it has brought a lot of confidence to the company’s work and has also served as a crucial aspect in closing the latest funding round. 

As with any scale-up, Asgard’s journey has not been without some challenges. When asked to share them, Fabio mentioned several. First, being a company developing a first-in-class cancer treatment modality with a unique mode of action is a challenge on its own, but having an experienced and highly skilled team is a crucial part of making it work. 

Another notable challenge was raising the recent Series A round. Asgard’s CEO Cristiana Pires met over 60 VCs until finally closing the deal with the lead investors. 

“Due to the financial climate in 2023, to close the Series A round at the beginning of 2024 was very challenging. It was a result of hard work from our CEO and the whole team.”

Leveraging the EIC Scaling Club

Having met us for a talk at the Scale 100 Forum in Athens, Fabio shared his impressions of this EIC Scaling Club event, noting that he sees it as a place to discuss common challenges with other Scaling Club companies. “We might be working in biotech, but there's a lot of common ground regarding challenges with companies from other sectors, and we can learn from each other. Sharing knowledge, experiences, and contacts is one of the main benefits of this event,” he says. 

When it comes to participating in the EIC Scaling Club, Fabio says that for Asgard, it’s all about making new connections, pampering the existing ones, and providing regular updates on the company’s progress. Being in an active search for partners, Asgard benefits from being able to discuss the process with other companies who have been through similar journeys. 

“Essentially, networking is something that we expect from this program. We want to mature our business case and expect to collect more funding in the future.”

See the full interview with Fabio Rosa in the video below, or visit our YouTube channel (and enjoy our other videos while you're there!).

About the EIC Scaling Club

The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120+ European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.

The top 120+ European deep tech companies will be carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.

The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.

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