The EIC Accelerator Backed Midatech's DIPG Drug: Did It Work

Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, or DIPG, is a childhood brain cancer with an average life expectancy of 7 to 9 months, according to the company that tried to treat it. In the October 2019 round of the European Innovation Council's EIC Accelerator pilot, a Cardiff company, Midatech Ltd, was selected with blended finance for GlioKIDS, a project to test its drug MTX110 as a treatment for DIPG by pumping it directly into the tumour, according to the European Commission's list of selected companies. The list names no other beneficiary for the project. On 5 December 2019 its listed parent, Midatech Pharma PLC, announced "confirmation of a €2.6 million EU Grant" for a European trial in about 20 children, in a release filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and reprinted by BioPharmaWatch.

The money never arrived. In January 2021 the company said the EU had notified it that "because its relationships with China Medical System Holdings Ltd and its affiliate, it does not qualify as an SME and is therefore not eligible to receive the GlioKIDS grant", according to its business update, also published by BioSpace. GlioKIDS has no entry on CORDIS, the EU's project database: a search for the acronym returns no results. The European trial was never run.

Where the Company Stands Now

The legal beneficiary still exists. Midatech Ltd was renamed Biodexa Ltd in May 2023, is listed as active by Companies House and filed small-company accounts for 2025 in April 2026. Its parent, renamed Biodexa Pharmaceuticals PLC in March 2023 according to its own Companies House record, left London's AIM market on 26 April 2023 and remains listed on Nasdaq. The Gazette carries only routine Companies House filing lists for the Biodexa companies, and no insolvency notice.

The drug the EIC selected is no longer the company's focus. Biodexa's annual report for 2025, filed with the SEC in March 2026, says that "due to resource constraints, MTX110 has been de-prioritized and is no longer a key program", that it has closed its laboratory in Cardiff and that it no longer invests in its drug delivery technologies. Its lead asset is eRapa, an oral form of rapamycin it in-licensed in April 2024, now in a Phase 3 trial called Serenta; by September 2026, 92 of a planned 168 patients had been enrolled, according to its 2026 interim results. The same results still show £155,000 of spending on MTX110 in glioblastoma in the first half of 2026.

The Technology: Drug Straight Into the Tumour

Most cancer drugs cannot cross the blood-brain barrier in useful amounts. MTX110 is a water-soluble form of panobinostat, a cancer drug that blocks enzymes called histone deacetylases, made soluble by binding it to a cyclodextrin so that it can be infused through a catheter directly into the tumour, a technique called convection-enhanced delivery (CED). The company said in 2019 that this produces drug concentrations at the tumour "more than 100,000 times higher" than current treatments, based on pre-clinical work, and that GlioKIDS would be "the first ever clinical trial to use a fully implantable" CED catheter system for chronic treatment. Both claims are the company's own and were not independently tested in the trial, because the trial did not take place.

The December 2019 release said there were "no approved therapeutic treatments" for DIPG. The children in the later US study at UCSF were treated with MTX110 only after they had completed radiotherapy.

What the EIC Award Promised, and What Happened

The plan was concrete. GlioKIDS was to be an open-label European study of about 20 patients with a one-year treatment period, with the EU grant covering 70% of the costs and Midatech the rest, and the grant agreement was expected to be finalised in early 2020. The company's 2019 results named the sites: the Kinderspital in Zurich and the Princess Máxima Center in Utrecht, for 19 patients, with 12-month survival as the main endpoint, according to its June 2020 results release.

The company's own figures for the award differ. The December 2019 release and a February 2020 circular say €2.6 million (£2.19 million); the June 2020 results say €2.7 million (£2.3 million). The Commission's list records the award as blended finance, which in the EIC Accelerator pilot meant a grant plus an equity investment, while Midatech described only a grant. Midatech is not among the roughly 315 companies on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, and no equity investment has been announced.

The problem was ownership. On 29 January 2019, months before the cut-off, Midatech had agreed an £8 million investment from China Medical System Holdings and A&B (HK) Company, which according to the company's 2018 annual results gave them 51% of the shares on 26 February 2019 and allowed CMS "to exert control over Midatech". At the time of the announcement, Proactive Investors reported the new shares as a 77.3% stake, before a parallel share offer to other investors. Under the EU's SME definition, a firm that is part of a larger group may have to count that group's staff, turnover and balance sheet. By 31 March 2020 Midatech said that "because of a technicality, the EU has not yet confirmed Midatech's status as an SME" and that the trial "may be cancelled if the EU grant is not received", in its strategic review announcement. In September 2020 it was still "waiting to hear from the EU", according to its interim results. The January 2021 notice ended it.

1. Signed EU grant agreement, early 2020Not deliveredRuled not an SME in January 2021; no CORDIS project.
2. European GlioKIDS trial, about 20 children in Zurich and UtrechtNot deliveredNever started; the company switched to US studies.
3. Repeated CED of MTX110 with an implanted systemPartly, outside the projectTested in 9 children at Columbia University with two infusions each, not in GlioKIDS.
4. Proof of efficacy in DIPGNot deliveredOnly small Phase I studies; no Phase II trial has started.

What Happened to MTX110 Without the EU

The drug kept moving, slowly and in the United States. A Phase I study at the University of California, San Francisco, PNOC015, treated 7 children between May 2018 and March 2020 with 48 infusions; three had dose-limiting toxicities and median overall survival was 26.1 months, which the authors said "compares favorably with historical data", according to the paper in Neuro-Oncology (2023). Biodexa's announcement of the paper gave the journal as the Journal of Neuro-Oncology; the PubMed record says Neuro-Oncology. The study had no control group.

A second Phase I study, led by Columbia University in children with newly diagnosed diffuse midline glioma, the wider group of tumours that includes DIPG, started on 10 March 2020 and was completed on 22 November 2023 with 9 patients, according to ClinicalTrials.gov. Biodexa reported a median overall survival of 16.5 months after two infusions, against 10.0 months in a historical reference group, in a July 2024 release, and said the data supported doses for "proposed Phase II studies". No such study has been announced.

In adults, the company ran MAGIC-G1, a Phase I study in recurrent glioblastoma that started in October 2022. It enrolled 4 patients and was terminated for a "strategic decision", with the last data collected on 10 September 2024, according to ClinicalTrials.gov. The company reported in October 2024 survival of 12 to 13 months in those patients. The EU orphan designation for panobinostat in glioma, granted on 18 July 2022, was withdrawn from the Union register in July 2025 at the sponsor's request, according to the European Medicines Agency; Biodexa's 2025 annual report still describes MTX110 as a designated orphan medicinal product. In 2020 and 2021 Midatech was also in a dispute with Secura Bio, the licensor of panobinostat, which twice declined to withdraw a notice terminating the licence, according to the January 2021 update; how that dispute ended is not stated in the filings reviewed for this article.

The Money

Midatech has lost money every year. Group net losses from 2019 to 2025 total £64.58 million, peaking at £22.19 million in 2020, the year it ended in-house development of its other lead drug, MTD201, and offered redundancy to all 42 staff at its Bilbao plant, according to the March 2020 announcement. Revenue was £381,000 in 2023 and nil in 2024 and 2025, and average staff fell from 65 in 2019 to 11 in 2025, according to the company's annual reports, whose figures are collected in the SEC's XBRL data. The company has kept going by issuing shares repeatedly and has changed its share and ADS ratios several times to meet Nasdaq listing rules; its 2025 report says the need for new financing "raises substantial doubt" about its ability to continue as a going concern.

Why Europe Should Care

Childhood cancer is one of the explicit priorities of the EU's cancer policy. Under Europe's Beating Cancer Plan the Commission runs a Helping Children with Cancer initiative, and says cancer in children, adolescents and young adults is prioritised in all research topics of the EU Cancer Mission. GlioKIDS would have put an experimental DIPG treatment into two European children's cancer centres. Instead the clinical data for MTX110 came from American hospitals.

The case also shows a trade-off in EIC rules. The SME requirement keeps public money away from companies controlled by large groups, here a Chinese pharmaceutical group that held Greater China rights to Midatech's pipeline. But it was applied only after the company had been publicly selected and had built its plans around the grant.

The Verdict

Biodexa and the European Innovation Council have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company filings and EU and clinical trial databases, linked throughout.