TargED's EIC Accelerator Award Backs a Clot-Busting Nanobody

rh-tPA, the established clot-dissolving drug for acute ischaemic stroke, needs fibrin to activate plasminogen, and in a 2022 mouse study with platelet-rich clots it did not significantly shrink the brain lesion. TargED Biopharmaceuticals, a 2020 spin-off of UMC Utrecht, anchors its drug to a different protein. Its lead drug, TGD001, is described by Pulse 2.0 and biotechnews.nl as an antibody-enzyme fusion protein that binds von Willebrand factor, which the company says is present in every clot, and breaks the clot down with the enzyme urokinase. The binding part is a small single-domain antibody, a VHH, which the company website and the CORDIS project title call a nanobody.

In 2022 the company named its lead compound Microlyse, the molecule of its founding papers; by its EU orphan designation release of 29 July 2024 it was naming it TGD001. The mechanism the company and the press describe is the same, but no source found states in so many words that the two are one compound.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, TANO-TAC ("Thrombolytic Nanobody Therapy for Dissolving All Types of Blood Clots"), at its March 2025 cut-off for blended finance. CORDIS records a grant agreement of €2,499,471.82 running from 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2027, and the company announced on 30 June 2025 that the package also included up to €10 million of equity. A year later the company named the EIC Fund as a new investor in its Series A2 round, a fact repeated by co-investor Curie Capital.

What the drug does differently

The founding paper, de Maat and colleagues in Blood in January 2022, describes the molecule as a fusion of a high-affinity VHH against the CT/CK domain of von Willebrand factor with the protease domain of urokinase plasminogen activator, built for "localized plasminogen activation on microthrombi". The authors report that at equal molar concentrations it degraded microthrombi sevenfold faster than caplacizumab, a bivalent humanised VHH that blocks platelets from binding the same factor, and that in mice lacking the ADAMTS13 enzyme, a model of thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP), it reduced thrombocytopenia and tissue damage more than caplacizumab without affecting tail-clip bleeding. Press coverage of the 2022 Series A, such as Silicon Canals, presented the sevenfold figure as a mouse result; the paper's abstract places it in the clearance experiments and reports the mouse findings separately.

A second paper, van Moorsel and colleagues in Blood in December 2022, compared the drug with rh-tPA, which the authors call an important thrombolytic agent for acute ischaemic stroke, in two randomised, blinded mouse stroke models. In fibrin-rich clots both drugs restored blood flow and shrank lesions. In platelet-rich clots neither restored flow significantly at 10 minutes, but Microlyse reduced lesion volume at 24 hours and rh-tPA did not. The authors concluded the findings "support broad applicability of Microlyse in ischemic stroke, irrespective of the thrombus composition". Those are mouse results; no efficacy result in human patients has been published.

From healthy volunteers to stroke patients

The company announced on 19 December 2024 that it had entered the clinic. The trial record for EU trial number 2024-514931-63-00 on ctis.eu lists the first-in-human study as a single-ascending-dose trial in healthy volunteers at Charité Research Organisation in Berlin, with recruitment opened on 18 November 2024, a temporary halt on 21 February 2025 for "study management reasons" with no change to the benefit-risk balance reported, a trial period of 14 March to 22 July 2025, and status ended. Its results summary is deferred until 22 January 2028.

The company presented the results orally at the American Society of Hematology meeting on 8 December 2025. Its release says TGD001 was safe and well tolerated across four ascending dose cohorts with no spontaneous bleeding events; Pulse 2.0 reported the same and the company's description of "potent thrombolytic activity". Neither source gives participant numbers or dose levels.

Two patient studies followed. The stroke study (2025-522455-26-00) is a Phase 1b/2a dose-finding trial followed by a randomised, placebo-controlled expansion, with 130 participants planned at 16 sites in Germany, Poland and Spain, listed as recruiting. The company announced on 16 July 2026 that the first patients had been dosed. The TTP study (2025-523802-34-00) is an adaptive basket trial in immune-mediated TTP and other thrombotic microangiopathies, with 70 participants planned in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States; the register lists it as authorised with recruitment pending, and its ClinicalTrials.gov entry gives an anticipated start of 31 October 2026.

What TANO-TAC promised, and what can already be checked

The CORDIS objective says TargED was preparing clinical work in immune TTP and acute ischaemic stroke, had raised more than €45 million, and planned a €25 million Series B to fund Phase 2a trials and a 1,000-litre GMP manufacturing run. It also says TGD001 "has shown superior results in preclinical studies", which is the company's claim. CORDIS shows no periodic report or results for the project. The Dutch enterprise agency RVO says its training helped prepare the application, which succeeded at the first attempt, and that the company was aiming to treat its first patients in the first half of 2026; the first stroke patients were dosed in July.

1. Clinical study in acute ischaemic strokeStartedFirst patients dosed per the company, 16 July 2026; listed as recruiting in the trial record. No results yet.
2. Clinical study in immune TTPPendingAuthorised, recruitment pending per the trial record.
3. Safety in humansReportedNo spontaneous bleeding across four dose cohorts, per the company at ASH 2025; register results deferred to 2028.
4. €25M Series BDifferent routeNo Series B announced; a €40.4M Series A2 round instead, per biotechnews.nl.
5. 1,000-litre GMP manufacturing runNot publicNo announcement found on the company news page, which lists a VP CMC appointment on 5 March 2026.

Funding: venture money first, the EIC Fund later

The company was seeded with €1.35 million in November 2020 by FIRST, Curie Capital and Utrecht Health Seed Fund, with Health Holland support, according to HollandBio. In February 2022 Andera Partners announced a €39 million Series A led in equal parts by Andera, Fund+, Hadean Ventures, Inkef Capital and Sunstone Life Science Ventures.

In December 2025 the company announced a €21.5 million Series A extension led by BioGeneration Ventures, reported by Pulse 2.0 and BeBeez. On 24 June 2026 it announced the second and final closing of that A2 round at €40.4 million, with Kurma Partners and the EIC Fund as new investors and total Series A financing above €80 million. Biotechnews.nl quotes Hermann Hauser, a board member of the EIC Fund, as saying TargED "exemplifies the ambition we want to support". How much the EIC Fund invested has not been published, so whether it took up the full €10 million mentioned in 2025 is not public. Curie Capital's release carries a June 2025 dateline in its text and a June 2026 date in its header; the company dates the announcement 24 June 2026.

The balance sheets filed with the Dutch trade register, as summarised by Liza and Eulerpool, show equity of €9.71 million at the end of 2022, falling to €1.66 million at the end of 2024 and rising to €15.56 million at the end of 2025, the year in which the company announced the €21.5 million extension. Debts rose each year, from €1.30 million to €5.30 million. Neither summary shows the annual result. North Data lists accounts filed for every year from 2022 to 2025 and no insolvency publication. The staff figures disagree: Liza gives 11 FTE for 2025, while RVO writes that the company grew from 4 research employees to more than 25.

Where it sits in European policy

Stroke is a declared European priority: the Action Plan for Stroke in Europe 2018 to 2030 of the European Stroke Organisation and the Stroke Alliance for Europe sets a goal of cutting the absolute number of strokes by 10%, and SAFE cites a projected 34% rise in cases by 2035. On the TTP side, the drug holds EU orphan designation EU/3/24/2946, the EU's incentive scheme for rare-disease medicines, with TargED as sponsor, and the company announced a matching US designation in March 2025. A designation is not an approval. The stroke study runs at sites in three EU member states.

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