Did the EIC Accelerator Pay Off for TheraPanacea's Radiotherapy AI

TheraPanacea, a Paris company founded in 2017 by applied mathematician Nikos Paragios, sells ART-Plan, software that uses artificial intelligence to outline tumours and organs on medical scans and to prepare radiotherapy treatment plans. In the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 round with the 5 June 2019 cut-off, it won an EU grant of €2,477,708 for ART-AI, a €3,539,583.75 project to build what it called "the world's first fully automated TPS for MRI guided radiotherapy", a treatment planning system that would update the radiation dose "on-the-fly" while a patient lies in an MRI-equipped linear accelerator, according to CORDIS. The company appears under its own name, with no partner company, in the European Commission's list of June 2019 winners, and the French AI news site ActuIA reported the €2.5 million award in September 2019.

Seven years on, the company is active and its products are in clinical use. Parts of the MRI work did reach the market: the US Food and Drug Administration cleared ART-Plan's generation of synthetic CT images from MRI scans in June 2022. The real-time MR-Linac planner, the core of the grant, has not appeared as a product.

Where TheraPanacea Stands in 2026

The company is operating. The French business directory lists it as an active simplified joint-stock company (SAS) with 50 to 99 employees in 2024 and its seat at avenue Ledru-Rollin in Paris since 1 October 2025, according to the state company directory and Societe.com. No insolvency proceedings are recorded. In April 2026 it said 16 abstracts written with clinical partners in Europe and the United States had been accepted at ESTRO 2026, the main European radiotherapy congress, according to the company. The same month, Magdeburg University Hospital in Germany said it had begun using software from TheraPanacea to generate synthetic CT images from MRI scans for radiotherapy planning, according to the university's medical faculty. The FDA cleared ART-Plan+ version 3.1.0 on 23 December 2025, according to the clearance letter.

The register also shows two changes that the company has not explained publicly. A notice published on 28 January 2025 records a reduction of the registered share capital from €269,746.66 to €178,540 and the departure of Therinvest, its 2018 investor, from the board, according to BODACC, the official journal of company notices, and North Data. The accounts for 2022, 2023 and 2024 were all published on 7 May 2026, in some cases more than three years after the year end, according to BODACC. Earlier accounts were filed with a confidentiality declaration, so revenue is not public. The state directory gives a net profit of €83,952 for 2021, and Societe.com gives the same figure rounded to €84,000; no later result could be verified.

The Technology: Planning Radiotherapy From MRI

Before radiotherapy, clinicians draw the outline of the tumour and of every nearby organ on a CT scan, slice by slice, and a planning system then calculates how the beams should deliver the dose. CT is used because it measures tissue density, which the dose calculation needs. MRI shows soft tissue far better but gives no density information, so many patients are scanned twice and the images are aligned by hand. MRI-guided linear accelerators, such as Elekta's Unity and ViewRay's MRIdian, which CORDIS names in the project summary, image the patient during treatment, but adapting the plan to that day's anatomy still demanded a team at the machine.

ART-AI was to close that gap with three pieces: neural networks that generate a "pseudo-CT" from an MRI scan, automatic contouring on MRI, and fast re-planning on each session's images through deformable image registration and reinforcement learning, according to the project's final report on CORDIS. In its December 2023 FDA file, TheraPanacea named Varian's Ethos treatment planning software as the main comparable device, according to K232479; unlike such systems, ART-Plan runs alongside the clinic's own planning system. Its SmartPlan module produces a plan that users import into "their own Treatment Planning System (TPS) for the dose calculation, review and approval", and it covers prostate prescriptions only, according to the December 2025 FDA file.

What ART-AI Promised, and What the Record Shows

The project ran from 1 November 2019 to 31 July 2022, signed on 31 October 2019, and is closed. Its final report says the team built algorithms to generate pseudo-CTs from T1 MRI scans of the brain, abdomen and pelvis with 3D generative adversarial networks, to contour organs and tumours on contrast-enhanced MRI, and to adjust plans through registration between the planning CT and each session's MRI. It says a cloud-based prototype would be used in clinical trials by three clinical partners, and that it had "secured and started the clinical trial". The end result was to be "a fully validated software platform ready for commercial launch". The partners named when the award was announced were Gustave Roussy, the Institut du Cancer de Montpellier and the University of Tübingen, according to ActuIA.

Several of these pieces became regulated product features. The FDA's June 2022 clearance of ART-Plan says the software offers "deep-learning based synthetic CT-generation from MR images" for the male pelvis and the brain, and automatic contouring on MRI for the abdomen, brain and male pelvis, according to the 510(k) summary K220813; the December 2023 clearance repeats these features and lists MRI contouring models for Elekta pelvis scans and for TrueFISP scans, the type used in the low-field study below, according to K232479. A study in eight centres, led by the Institut du Cancer de Montpellier and published in November 2023, tested TheraPanacea's pseudo-CT software on 0.35 tesla MRI scans of the pelvis and found dose differences within 1% for target volumes and 2% for organs at risk in 29 prostate patients, according to Frontiers in Oncology and PubMed Central. The paper declares Paragios's role as chief executive of TheraPanacea and reports no outside funding.

The adaptive function that reached the market works differently from what the grant described. In the FDA files, ART-Plan's AdaptBox gives "assisted CBCT-based off-line adaptation decision-making": it builds a synthetic CT from the cone-beam CT taken before each session and helps decide whether a new plan is needed. That is a decision aid between sessions, not a planning system that rewrites the dose on the fly inside an MR-Linac. No product, clearance or company statement describing real-time MRI-guided planning could be found, and the results of the clinical trial named in the final report have not been published.

1. Pseudo-CT from MRIDeliveredFDA-cleared June 2022 for male pelvis and brain (K220813).
2. Automatic contouring on MRIDeliveredAbdomen, brain and male pelvis on MRI, in the FDA files.
3. Real-time dose adaptation inside the MR-LinacNot achievedOnly offline, CBCT-based replanning decisions are cleared.
4. Clinical validation with partnersPartialRetrospective eight-centre study in 2023; trial results not published.
5. Commercial launch of the full suitePartialART-Plan sold in Europe and the US; no MR-Linac planner.

Growth Since the Award

ART-Plan's first FDA clearance, K202700, was decided on 14 January 2021, according to the FDA database. That date sits awkwardly with an Université Paris-Saclay profile of June 2022, which says ART-Plan "has been certified and marketed since 2019" in Europe and the US. Six further clearances followed: K220813 in June 2022, K230023 in April 2023, K232479 in December 2023, K234068 in April 2024, K242822 for ART-Plan+ 3.0.0 in February 2025 and K253091 in December 2025.

Customer numbers come only from the company and its partners. In November 2021 TheraPanacea said about 40 centres in Europe used the software, plus centres in Senegal and Togo, and signed DYN'r Medical Systems to distribute it in the US with a target of about 20 American centres the following year, according to French Healthcare; in December 2021 Pharmaphorum reported "more than 40 leading European centres". The Paris-Saclay profile says about 50 hospitals used it and that one in five radiotherapy patients in France, about 40,000 people, were treated with it in 2021. Later company figures of more than 120 centres could not be traced to a dated primary source. Whether the US target was met could not be verified.

The largest outside money came from a pharmaceutical company, not a venture fund. On 15 December 2021 Biogen agreed to invest up to $15 million in TheraPanacea convertible debt, with up to about $41 million more in milestone payments and exclusive rights to the technology in neuroscience, according to Biogen and Pharmaphorum. The Paris-Saclay profile describes it as "a €50 million investment"; the published terms do not support that figure, and no milestone payment has been announced. The same profile counted 60 employees across Paris, Lyon, Montpellier and Athens in June 2022, with plans to double within 18 months; the INSEE band of 50 to 99 staff for 2024 suggests that doubling has not happened, though the band is too coarse to be sure.

Other EU Funding

ART-AI was not TheraPanacea's first EU grant. From November 2017 to April 2019 it held a €150,000 European Research Council Proof of Concept grant for "digital, innovative, patient-specific, and adaptive radiotherapy treatment planning", according to CORDIS. Together, the two grants brought the company €2,627,708 in EU money. No other CORDIS project naming the company as a participant was found.

Why It Matters for Europe

Europe's Beating Cancer Plan, presented in February 2021, is the EU's main cancer policy, according to the European Commission. Its first follow-up, the SAMIRA action plan on radiological and nuclear technology, names "improving radiation quality and safety in medicine" and innovation in medical uses of ionising radiation among its three priorities, according to the European American Chamber of Commerce and European Sources Online. Software that standardises contouring and shortens planning fits that agenda; European users reported time savings of more than 90%, the company told French Healthcare, a figure no independent study has confirmed across centres. TheraPanacea is also a rare European independent in a field dominated by large equipment makers, and it says no personal health data leave the European Economic Area. Its most strategic asset, though, is now tied to a US partner: Biogen holds exclusive rights to its technology in neuroscience.

The Verdict

TheraPanacea was not asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout.