MaxiVAX Since the EIC Accelerator: Cancer Vaccine Licensed Out

MaxiVAX no longer exists under that name. The Geneva company that won an EU grant of €2,785,300 in 2019 to take its personalised cancer vaccine through a Phase II trial has been called Release Therapeutics SA since September 2023, according to the Swiss commercial register and North Data. Its lead programme is now a treatment for metachromatic leukodystrophy, a rare inherited brain disease of young children. In September 2025 it granted an exclusive licence for the cancer vaccine to Geneva University Hospitals (HUG) and the University of Geneva (UNIGE), keeping an option to buy back future developments, according to the company's announcement, also summarised by Patsnap Synapse.

The EU-funded trial itself worked on its own terms. It met its primary endpoint, survival at six months, but it did so with 16 patients instead of the 40 to 45 the project described, and the chordoma trial that the EIC project summary promised for the EU and the United States has no public trace.

What the Company Does Now

Release Therapeutics describes itself as a company that wants "to treat genetic disorders of the CNS without gene therapy", according to its website. The address is the one MaxiVAX moved to in 2020, and the register still lists vaccination next to genetic diseases in the corporate purpose, rewritten in September 2024. The old domain, maxivax.ch, now shows only "Site inexistant".

The pivot reuses MaxiVAX's core hardware. The cancer vaccine depended on a small implantable capsule filled with engineered human muscle precursor cells (myoblasts) that secrete a protein. For metachromatic leukodystrophy, the same kind of capsule is meant to deliver arylsulfatase A, the enzyme these children lack, past the blood-brain barrier. In July 2024 the company reported a collaboration with the Paris Brain Institute in which treated mice showed "reversal of disease progression" after three months, and in August 2024 it closed a CHF 3.3 million seed round with unnamed private investors, according to BioSpace and the Greater Geneva Bern area agency. The seed release said a Series A would follow in the fourth quarter of 2024 to fund an application to start clinical trials. By October 2026 no Series A had been announced; the company's January 2025 note on its new chief executive still said it was "preparing to raise" one.

Leadership has turned over twice since the rename. Thomas Mehrling, a former Takeda and Mundipharma executive, was named chief executive in mid-2024 "following a strategic pivot", according to Startupticker; his signing powers were removed from the register in March 2025, when chief operating officer Julien Grogg took over. The company is active: in 2025 and 2026 it published news on its research, joined a Swiss start-up trip to China, and in October 2026 announced a mouse study in iScience on encapsulated cells that deliver an anti-CTLA-4 antibody inside tumours.

The Technology: A Vaccine Made From the Patient's Own Tumour

MVX-ONCO-1 has two parts. Surgeons take tumour tissue from the patient, and the cells are irradiated so they cannot divide but still carry the tumour's antigens; these are injected under the skin. Next to the injection site, two capsules are implanted for a week. They contain an allogeneic human cell line engineered to release GM-CSF, an immune signal that draws immune cells to the injection site. The treatment ran over nine weeks, with six vaccinations, according to the trial registration.

Most approved cancer immunotherapies are off-the-shelf drugs, such as checkpoint antibodies, given to every patient alike. MaxiVAX's difference is the combination of a patient-specific antigen source and the capsule, which keeps the GM-CSF-producing cells walled off from the immune system, releases the signal locally and can be removed. Because the antigens come from the patient's whole tumour, the approach is not tied to one known target, which is why the company presented it as applicable to several cancers, according to the CORDIS report. The project named chordoma, a rare cancer of the skull base and spine with no approved drug, as its second indication, according to CORDIS. The cost is that every dose has to be made from each patient's own surgery.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What the Record Shows

MaxiVAX appears under its own name, with no partner company, in the European Commission's list of winners of the 5 June 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 pilot that preceded today's EIC Accelerator. The grant agreement was signed on 31 October 2019. MaxONCO ran from 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2022, with a total cost of €3,979,000, of which the EU paid €2,785,300, according to CORDIS.

The project set out to run the Phase II trial in 40 to 45 head and neck cancer patients at four to six Swiss sites, to run a chordoma trial in the EU and the United States, to prepare commercialisation, and to grow from 8 to 25 employees. The trial, SAKK 11/16, had already opened in July 2018 with the Swiss Group for Clinical Cancer Research and charity funding, according to Startupticker, so the EU money financed its completion rather than its start.

The final periodic report says 16 head and neck patients were treated and that "the trial has reached positive outcome", with database lock still pending. It also reports a manufacturing agreement with Minaris Regenerative Medicine for the next-generation capsules of MVX-ONCO-2, announced in February 2021 and confirmed by Contract Pharma, with the aim of supplying Phase II and III trials. The report says nothing about chordoma.

The results were published in August 2025 in Experimental Hematology & Oncology, according to PubMed Central and the University of Geneva repository. Patients were enrolled between 13 August 2018 and 25 July 2022. Of the 16, 68.8% were alive at 26 weeks; median overall survival was 11.4 months, and 32% were alive after 18 months. The paper says that once the endpoint was met, "a decision to stop enrollment was made by the sponsor". It gives the planned sample as 39, while CORDIS and the 2018 launch gave 40 to 45. It was a single-arm study without a control group, so it shows that patients did better than the authors' benchmark, not that the vaccine caused it. The paper lists the EIC grant 880194 among its funders and states that MaxiVAX took part in the design, analysis and interpretation of the study, and that Nicolas Mach is a co-founder and minority shareholder.

1. Phase II trial in head and neck cancerDeliveredEndpoint met, published 2025.
2. 40 to 45 patientsPartly16 enrolled, stopped early.
3. Chordoma trial in the EU and USNot deliveredNo trial registered or announced.
4. Scaled-up GMP manufacturingDeliveredMinaris agreement, 2021.
5. Prepare commercialisationNot deliveredVaccine licensed to HUG and UNIGE.
6. Grow to 25 employeesUnverifiedNo staff figures public.

On timing, the trial's primary completion date was 25 January 2023 and its overall completion 29 June 2023, according to ClinicalTrials.gov, about six months after the EU project ended. No results have been posted to the registry. A search of ClinicalTrials.gov for the company and its product returns only two trials, the Phase I and this Phase II, and no chordoma study; the 2018 report that the US Food and Drug Administration had cleared an investigational new drug application for MaxiVAX could not be matched to any registered US trial.

After the Grant: Rename, Recapitalisation, Licence

The second-generation vaccine did reach patients, but not under the company. MVX-ONCO-2 entered a Phase I trial of six patients with advanced solid tumours at HUG in October 2024, sponsored by the hospital, with primary completion expected in November 2026, according to ClinicalTrials.gov. All six had completed the vaccination schedule by 22 July 2025, the company said in its licence announcement. The Phase II and III trials that the Minaris deal was meant to supply have not started.

The register shows how the company was refinanced. The September 2023 entry that changed the name also raised share capital from CHF 400,881.30 to CHF 664,098.40, partly by converting CHF 1,421,450 of debt into shares. In June 2024 new shares were paid with CHF 1,859,715 in cash and the same amount in converted debt, and in September 2025 capital rose again to CHF 1,115,069.20, according to Zefix and North Data. Whether the June 2024 issue is the CHF 3.3 million seed round announced in August is not stated. Swiss companies of this kind do not publish accounts, so revenue, losses and staff numbers are not public.

Recognition for the oncology work has kept coming after the company let it go. In January 2026 a HUG and UNIGE team won the Pfizer Research Prize for the Phase I study of MVX-ONCO-1, in which 34 patients with advanced solid tumours were treated and more than half showed clinical benefit, according to HUG and the company. CORDIS had described the same trial as having 25 patients in 2019; the registry gives 34 enrolled.

Why It Matters for Europe

Head and neck cancer causes more than 650,000 new cases and 380,000 deaths a year worldwide, the CORDIS report says, and chordoma has no approved drug. Europe's Beating Cancer Plan names personalised medicine and access to new treatments as priorities. A small Swiss company running an academic-style trial with EU money and charity support fits that aim. Its exit from the field also shows a common gap: a positive single-arm trial in 16 patients is not enough to attract the money for a randomised trial, and the programme went back to a public hospital.

The Verdict

Release Therapeutics, HUG and the EIC were not asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout.