AEC Partners is proud to have supported the creation of ITCC-P4 gGmbH – Paediatric Preclinical Proof-of-Concept Platform, the first company in the world to offer preclinical drug testing for paediatric cancers, which remain the leading cause of disease-related death in children and adolescents.

ITCC-P4 project was initiated as a public-private partnership in 2017, as part of the European Union’s Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 (IMI2), with the goal to develop patient-specific preclinical laboratory models for the most common high-risk childhood cancers as well as relapses that are currently under-treated.

The new company is a public-private partnership bringing together 11 high-profile research institutions (listed below) and 3 private companies: Charles River Laboratories, Experimental Pharmacology & Oncology-Berlin-Buch GmbH and Xentech.

It is the first and only non-profit company worldwide to offer academic institutions, biotech and pharmaceutical companies, access to a comprehensive repertoire of 400+ fully characterized paediatric tumour models for systematic efficacy testing. The aim is to systematically test new treatment options for children and adolescents with cancer and to generate data to regulatory approval processes in order to make the development of new cancer therapies for children and adolescents more attractive.

We wish Pr Gilles Vassal (Gustave Roussy), Daphné Descarpentries (Gustave Roussy), Pr Stefan Pfister (KiTZ Heidelberg, DKFZ), Anna-Lisa Böttcher (DKFZ) and the ITCC-P4 team all the success with this game-changing initiative for the development of new cancer therapies for children and adolescents that still suffer and die from paediatric cancers.

AEC Partners’ support was provided by Jordi Esclusa and Julia Machon.