InProTher: EIC Accelerator Cancer Vaccine Yet to Reach a Patient

About 8% of the human genome is made of old viral DNA, according to a review in Frontiers in Immunology: the remains of retroviruses that infected our ancestors and became a permanent part of the genome. Most of these human endogenous retroviruses, or HERVs, stay silent in healthy tissue. In many cancers they switch back on. InProTher, a Copenhagen biotech founded in 2011, has spent more than a decade trying to turn that into a vaccine that teaches the immune system to attack tumours.

In 2021 the European Innovation Council backed the plan with a €2.5 million grant towards a €12.2 million project, and later with equity. The project was meant to take the lead vaccine, IPT001, into an accelerated trial across four cancers. It closed on 31 October 2025. According to its own closing report, no patient has yet been dosed.

What the Company Is Doing Today

InProTher now presents itself as HERVolution Therapeutics, a "dark genome" biotech with offices in Copenhagen and New York. In December 2023 it hired J. Robert Coleman, co-founder and long-time chief executive of the US vaccine company Codagenix, as chief executive. A year later it announced an $11.7 million Series A led by the Serum Institute of India, with the EIC Fund taking part. The money was to fund manufacturing with the Serum Institute and Phase 1 studies of IPT-001, which was "planned to enter the clinic in 2025".

The ambitions have also widened. The Series A announcement lists cancer, metabolic disease including type 2 diabetes, ALS and other diseases of ageing as targets. The company's registered purpose in Denmark covers immunotherapies against cancer, ageing and neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS, MS and Alzheimer's.

The Technology: Breaking Tolerance to Ancient Viruses

The appeal of HERVs as cancer targets is specificity. Because they are silent in normal tissue but active in many tumours, an immune response against them should hit cancer cells and spare healthy ones. The difficulty is that the immune system treats HERV proteins as "self" and ignores them. InProTher's platform, BreakImmune, engineers HERV antigens and delivers them with viral vectors, harmless adenoviruses carrying the antigen gene, in order to "break" that tolerance and provoke both antibody and T-cell responses. IPT001 was designed to be given with checkpoint inhibitors, the class of drugs that release the brakes on T cells.

That claim rests on preclinical work. The field is real and competitive: the French company ErVimmune, which also targets HERVs, raised a €17 million Series A first close in January 2026 and plans its first human trial for the first half of 2027. Neither company has yet shown that a HERV vaccine works in patients.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

CancERVacc ran from 1 July 2022 to 31 October 2025, 40 months, under the 2021 Open call. Innovayt, the consultancy that worked on the application, describes the package as €9.1 million: the €2.5 million grant plus €6.6 million of EIC equity, to fund "an accelerated multi-indication Phase I/II clinical trial" in breast, prostate, pancreatic and ovarian cancer.

1. Preclinical proof of conceptDeliveredCompleted "across multiple cancer models", per the CORDIS report.
2. Scalable vaccine manufacturingDelivered"Both Ad19 and Ad5F35 vectors can be manufactured at scale with high yield, stability, and purity."
3. Regulatory preparationPartialPositive feedback from Spain's medicines agency AEMPS on manufacturing and toxicology; clinical trial application still in preparation.
4. Multi-indication Phase I/II trialNot startedNo patient dosed at project close; the first trial will target non-small cell lung cancer, none of the four cancers named at the award.

The report is frank about the gap. The company made real progress on the pieces a trial needs, manufacturing and regulatory strategy, and it changed its leadership, including a new chief executive and chief medical officer. But the central deliverable of a €12.2 million clinical project, patients receiving the vaccine, did not happen within 40 months, and the promised 2025 start also passed without an announcement.

What Has Happened Since the Award

The investor base is stronger than most at this stage. A lead investor that is itself a vaccine manufacturer brings production capacity as well as money, and the EIC Fund's participation means the EU holds equity as well as having paid a grant. The switch from four solid tumours to lung cancer as the first indication may be a sensible clinical choice. It is also a different trial from the one the EIC funded.

The Money

The 2025 accounts, reported by Proff, show a pre-trial biotech spending as it prepares for the clinic: a pre-tax loss of DKK 25.6 million, a net loss of DKK 21.2 million after a tax credit, equity of DKK 31.8 million and total assets of DKK 48.5 million, with 22 employees. A register summary reported by Avisen Danmark puts the 2024 net loss at DKK 8.6 million, so spending rose sharply in the year the trial was supposed to begin.

Why Europe Should Care

Cancer is one of the EU's stated health priorities: Europe's Beating Cancer Plan earmarks €4 billion across EU4Health, Horizon Europe and Digital Europe. A platform that could extend from cancer to diseases of ageing is the kind of high-risk, high-reward bet the EIC exists to make. HERV biology is still a frontier, and a European company with manufacturing, regulatory and investor pieces in place is well positioned if the approach works.

The counterpoint is where the company is heading. Its chief executive, lead investor and part of its operations are outside the EU, and the rebrand came with a New York office. None of that is unusual in biotech, but it means the European return on the grant depends on the company staying anchored in Copenhagen as it grows.

The Verdict

InProTher has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.