Canopy and the EIC Accelerator: A Myasthenia Drug Awaits Its Trial

In myasthenia gravis, the immune system makes antibodies against the acetylcholine receptor, the docking point where nerves tell muscles to contract, and the result is muscle weakness. Canopy Immuno-Therapeutics, an Israeli company registered in Megadim, argues that most treatments damp down the immune system as a whole, and is trying to remove only the offending antibodies and the B cells that make them, with a molecule it calls an antigen-drug conjugate.

The EIC Accelerator selected its project, ADCure, for blended finance in 2026, and CORDIS records a grant agreement signed on 23 September 2026 with an EU contribution of €2,430,249.41, running from 1 October 2026 to 30 September 2028. The money is meant to take the lead drug, MGAC-007, into its first trial in people. A month into the project, that trial does not appear on ClinicalTrials.gov.

Removing the antibodies that do the damage, and nothing else

The company describes each conjugate as three parts: an autoantigen, the piece of the receptor that the disease antibodies recognise; an inhibitory Fc domain borrowed from antibody structure; and a linker carrying a toxic payload. In its listing for the 2026 BIO International Convention, Canopy says the molecule clears circulating disease antibodies by binding them, and kills the B cells whose surface receptors recognise the same antigen, because those cells take up the payload. The company website claims the approach targets fewer than 0.01% of antibodies and B-cell clones while preserving 99.99% of protective immunity. Those are the company's figures; no independent measurement of them was found.

The difference from approved drugs is the selectivity. The European Commission approved argenx's efgartigimod (Vyvgart), which blocks the neonatal Fc receptor and so lowers the level of all IgG antibodies, for adults with anti-acetylcholine receptor antibody positive generalised myasthenia gravis in August 2022, as argenx announced after a positive CHMP opinion. Canopy's pitch is a drug that takes out only the disease-specific antibodies and, by also removing the cells that make them, could produce lasting remission rather than a treatment repeated for life. Whether that holds in people is exactly what the EIC project is supposed to start testing.

What the data show so far

The published evidence for MGAC-007 is preclinical and company-authored. An abstract for the American Academy of Neurology's 2026 meeting, with Kfir Oved as first author and academic co-authors from the University of Miami, Maastricht University, the University at Buffalo and George Washington University, reports that the drug removed a median of 73% of disease antibodies from patient blood samples in the laboratory while sparing protective antibodies. In a rat model of myasthenic crisis it cut circulating disease antibodies by up to 90% within two hours, restored motor function and reduced mortality by 85 to 100%. The abstract notes it was not reviewed by the editors of Neurology.

The company's peer-reviewed work so far is on the disease rather than the drug. A study in Neurology, published online on 29 September 2025, first-authored by Canopy staff with Greek, Cypriot and Israeli hospital partners, profiled 513 patients and described two endotypes: mostly women with early-onset, more severe disease and antibodies dominated by one receptor subunit, and mostly late-onset patients with lower antibody levels dominated by another. Severe disease was more common in the first group, 44% against 27%. A follow-up abstract on 601 patients reports the same two groups. The company presents the paper as groundwork for its targeted therapies.

What ADCure promised

According to CORDIS, ADCure is to run a Phase 1 study at Charité, the Berlin university hospital, in patients with acetylcholine receptor antibody positive myasthenia gravis, measuring safety, how the drug behaves in the body and early signs of activity, supported by a network of 22 myasthenia centres. A consortium of contract manufacturers is to produce the drug substance to clinical-grade (GMP) standard and prepare for scale-up. The project summary puts the potential market for MGAC-007 at about €34 billion by 2035, a projection, not an independently verified figure.

The company has put a date on the trial. Canopy's BIO 2026 listing dates the first-in-human study to the fourth quarter of 2026 and a first readout to the first quarter of 2027. A search of the ClinicalTrials.gov registry on 4 November 2026 returned no study for MGAC-007, and a search by Canopy as sponsor returned none either; web searches found no listing in the EU's Clinical Trials Information System or at Charité. That is a gap in the records searched, not proof that no trial application has been filed.

1. Preclinical proof of conceptReportedPatient-serum, rat and mouse results in the AAN 2026 abstract; company-authored, not a full paper.
2. GMP drug substance from contract manufacturersNot publicThe company has announced no manufacturing partner or batch.
3. Phase 1 at CharitéPlannedDated to Q4 2026 by the company; no ClinicalTrials.gov entry found on 4 November 2026.
4. Safety and early activity in patientsToo earlyThe project runs to 30 September 2028.

A signed grant, and an equity figure only the company states

Canopy appears in the Commission's list of companies selected in the 2026 EIC Accelerator rounds, published with the EIC's announcement of 15 June 2026, with the recommended financing type "Blended Finance". That announcement covered 38 companies, €90 million in proposed grants and €202 million provisioned for potential equity investments, and the list itself warns that a selection is not a formal commitment of funding. On 22 June 2026 the company announced a €12.4 million award, made up of a €2.4 million grant and a €10 million equity investment.

The grant part is now a document: CORDIS records €2,430,249.41. The equity part is not. No EIC Fund announcement naming Canopy was found. The two figures are therefore shown apart, not added up. Before the EIC, the company's financing is thinly documented: startup directories such as StartupIM name TLV Partners as an investor without giving amounts, and the public register record carries no financial accounts, so no revenue, loss or headcount figure could be found.

The European case for ADCure

The company is Israeli, but the project places its clinical work in Germany. The CORDIS summary frames the case in health-system terms: it says autoimmune diseases affect one in ten people and cost the EU €57.2 billion a year, and that the platform could be extended to other antibody-driven diseases by swapping the antigen. The company's pipeline page lists five further programmes on that principle.

Other recognition is so far self-reported. Canopy announced on 22 June 2025 that it had won the Johnson & Johnson Precision Immunology Challenge after a nomination by J&J's JLABS; two searches for a Johnson & Johnson announcement of the result found none.

The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.