Faron's EIC Accelerator Macrophage Cancer Drug, Six Years On

In May 2018 Faron Pharmaceuticals, a listed biotech in Turku, watched its lead drug fail. Traumakine, an intravenous interferon beta for acute respiratory distress syndrome, missed the primary endpoint of its Phase III INTEREST trial, with 28-day mortality of 26.4% on the drug against 23.0% on placebo, according to the company's announcement of 8 May 2018. Its shares fell more than 80% in London the next day, PharmaTimes reported.

Two years later the European Innovation Council backed Faron's other programme. In the March 2020 cut-off of the EIC Accelerator pilot, Faron was selected for MAGIF, short for "Faron leading the way in macrophage guided immunotherapy", with a grant of €2,500,000 towards a total cost of €4,544,008.50, according to CORDIS. The Commission's list of selected companies records the award as grant only and names no other beneficiary for the project. The money was for an antibody then called Clevegen, now bexmarilimab. Six years on it is still Faron's lead asset. Its main target, though, has moved from the solid tumours MAGIF described to a bone marrow cancer, and it has not reached Phase III.

Where Faron Stands in 2026

Faron is an active, listed, clinical-stage company with no product revenue. The Finnish trade register shows it registered and without any listed insolvency or liquidation situation, at the same Turku address since 2015, according to the Finnish Patent and Registration Office's open data. Its half-year report published on 26 August 2026 shows cash of €32.0 million on 30 June 2026, an operating loss of €11.1 million for the half year and equity back in positive territory at €11.6 million, after a rights issue in April that raised gross proceeds of about €40.1 million. At the end of 2025 equity had been negative at €18.98 million in the parent company.

The money is earmarked for BEXERA, a randomised, placebo-controlled Phase 2b trial of bexmarilimab with azacitidine in untreated higher-risk myelodysplastic syndrome (HR-MDS), a bone marrow cancer. Faron expects it to enrol 90 patients at up to 35 sites and says its purpose is to select the dose for Phase III. The company said in August that it expected the trial to begin in the second half of 2026; no first patient had been announced by 8 October 2026, according to its list of releases. Analysts at Inderes wrote on 27 August 2026 that more financing will be needed by the second half of 2027 at the latest and that the company aims to get it through a partnership deal.

The balance sheet remains thin. On 30 September 2026 Faron agreed with Heights Capital Management, the holder of its convertible bonds, to defer €1.4 million of bond amortisation due on 2 October to the bonds' final maturity dates in 2028, saying the move would "limit near-term dilution for our shareholders", according to the announcement.

The Technology: Switching Off a Brake on Macrophages

Immune checkpoint inhibitors, the antibodies against PD-1 and PD-L1 that changed cancer care in the past decade, release brakes on T cells. Many tumours do not respond, partly because they are full of macrophages that suppress the immune attack. Clever-1 is a receptor on those suppressive macrophages. Bexmarilimab binds it, and the aim is to switch the macrophages from suppressing immunity to stimulating it. CORDIS describes the antibody as breaking "the immunosuppressive tolerance of tumours", and the MAGIF proposal claimed one advantage over existing immunotherapies: patients likely to benefit could be screened in advance.

The first human data were mixed in the way early cancer data usually are. In June 2022 Faron reported that in its MATINS trial, 65% (11 of 17) of patients whose disease was controlled by bexmarilimab were alive after 12 months, against 11% (8 of 73) of those whose disease was not, across ten cohorts of heavily pretreated solid tumours, according to the company announcement. That compares responders with non-responders, not treated patients with untreated ones, so it shows which patients did well rather than proving that the drug extended life. The full analysis appeared in Cell Reports Medicine in December 2023, reporting that the antibody was well tolerated and that disease control went with signs of macrophage activation, according to Faron.

What MAGIF Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

MAGIF ran from 1 October 2020 to 30 September 2022 and closed on schedule. Its final periodic report calls the first-in-human MATINS trial "the heart of the MAGIF project" and says recruitment went to plan through the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 200 patients by the end of September 2022. On business development the report says Faron identified possible licensing partners, held preliminary talks and set up a data room. It names the company website, branding and presentations at ESMO 2021, AACR 2022 and ASCO 2022 as communication results. It closes: "The expected result of the project will allow Faron to move into Phase III development." Faron's announcements of the period credit the grant: the June 2022 survival release carries the line that the project received Horizon 2020 funding under grant agreement 960914.

1. Run the MATINS first-in-human trialDeliveredOver 200 patients by September 2022; full results in Cell Reports Medicine, December 2023.
2. Show safety and early clinical benefitDeliveredWell tolerated; disease control in a minority of patients across ten tumour types, per the June 2022 release.
3. Sign a licensing partnerNot achievedTalks only. No deal announced by October 2026; Inderes still lists a partnership as a future aim.
4. Move into Phase IIINot achievedNo Phase III started. The next trial, BEXERA, is a Phase 2b meant to choose the Phase III dose.
5. Registrational path in solid tumoursNot achievedThe registrational plan moved to HR-MDS; solid tumour work continues only in investigator-initiated trials.

Judged by its own work plan, MAGIF did the clinical work it was paid for, on time, and the trial produced a peer-reviewed paper. The commercial half of the plan, a licence and a path to Phase III in the cancers the proposal named, has not happened four years after the project closed.

From Solid Tumours to the Bone Marrow

The CORDIS objective pitched bexmarilimab at "deadly cancer types without effective treatment options", meaning the solid tumours in MATINS. In June 2022 Faron said the MATINS data were "helping us design our upcoming registrational trials" in late-stage solid tumours. Those trials never started. Instead the company put its clinical money into BEXMAB, a trial combining bexmarilimab with standard care in MDS and acute myeloid leukaemia. Its Phase 2 part dosed the first relapsed MDS patient on 9 January 2024 and was designed to "provide final and optimized dosing for registrational study", according to the company.

The MDS data have been Faron's strongest. Its 2025 financial statements release reports a 45% complete remission rate in untreated HR-MDS patients and median overall survival of 14.5 months in relapsed or refractory patients, against what it calls historical survival of 5 to 6 months. Both the EMA and the FDA granted orphan drug designation for MDS in early 2025, and Faron held an End-of-Phase 2 meeting with the FDA in August 2025. These are single-arm results reported by the company. The same release says Faron decided against a seamless Phase II/III design and will run the Phase II part separately, citing the failure of a competitor's Phase III trial in HR-MDS, VERONA. The half-year report added the first overall survival cut for untreated patients in July 2026: after a median follow-up of 14.9 months, only the biallelic TP53-mutated subgroup had reached its median, at 8.8 months.

Solid tumours have not been dropped. In 2026 the company began supporting investigator-initiated trials that cost it little: BEXAR in soft-tissue sarcoma and BLAZE, which on 1 October 2026 dosed its first patient with bexmarilimab plus nivolumab in lung cancer and melanoma that stopped responding to PD-1 drugs, at the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden in London, according to Faron.

The Money, and the EIC Fund

The EIC's support did not end with the grant. On 12 February 2021 Faron raised €15 million by placing 3,521,127 shares at €4.26, and said the EIC Fund "was the largest of the new investors" and that Faron was "the first publicly listed company that the EIC Fund has invested in", according to its results announcement. The Commission's Stéphane Ouaki described the deal in the same release as financing "combining grants and equity". Faron did not disclose the EIC Fund's amount; Global Trade Alert records it as €10 million, a figure this article could not confirm from a second source. In October 2021 the fund made what Faron called "a second significant investment" in a €10.5 million placing at €3.80 a share, according to Faron and PharmaFile. Faron still appears in the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked on all 17 pages in October 2026; whether the fund still holds its shares is not stated there.

The share price kept falling: from €4.26 in February 2021 and €3.80 in October 2021 to €1.00 in the June 2024 share offering, which raised €30.7 million, €3.7 million of it by converting capital loans, according to the company. In 2025 Faron placed €12 million of shares and signed an up to €35 million convertible bond facility with Heights Capital Management, drawing €15 million in April and €10 million in December, part of which is repaid in new shares. The number of shares grew from 104,624,864 at the end of 2024 to 202,881,315 by 30 June 2026, according to the 2025 release and the half-year report.

The operating losses behind those rounds come from Faron's filed parent company accounts as shown by Asiakastieto, and are within €0.2 million of the group figures in Faron's own releases for 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. Staff numbers are less clear. Faron's 2023 financial statements release gives 40 employees at the end of 2022 and 34 at the end of 2023, while Asiakastieto lists 39 and 34 for the same years and 0 for 2025, which is not credible for a company that reported €4.5 million of personnel costs in general and administration alone that year. A 2025 headcount could not be verified.

Other EU Projects

MAGIF is Faron's only EU grant on CORDIS. The company is an unfunded partner, with a net EU contribution of €0, in two Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska-Curie training networks: Mac4Me, on macrophage targets in metastatic cancer, coordinated by Erasmus MC in Rotterdam from November 2024 to October 2028, and IMMUFELLOW, an immunology fellowship programme coordinated by the University of Turku from August 2025 to July 2030.

Why Europe Should Care

Europe's Beating Cancer Plan, presented by the Commission on 3 February 2021 with €4 billion earmarked from EU4Health, Horizon Europe and Digital Europe, includes a pillar on diagnosis and treatment and an initiative to improve access to innovative cancer treatments, according to the Commission and Digestive Cancers Europe. A European-owned, first-in-class immunotherapy fits that aim. Faron also shows a pattern common to European biotech: public money, from the EIC grant and the EIC Fund, carried the drug through early trials, while the late-stage trials that decide whether a drug reaches patients will need a partner or far larger capital, most likely from outside the EU budget.

The Verdict

Faron Pharmaceuticals and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company announcements and EU project data, linked throughout.