Dirac Biosciences

Dirac Biosciences develops pioneering gene circuit technology to detect and treat cancer and other diseases.

The challenge

18.1M

people diagnosed with cancer in 2020

>€100Bn/ year

overall economic impact of cancer in Europe

Nearly 10M

lost their lives to cancer in 2020

>29%

cancer mortality prediction to increase by 2040 in Europe

*WHO – Cancer, 2022

*EC – Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan, 2021

Unless action is taken, this clinical and economic burden will grow. That’s why early cancer detection and new therapies are key public health priorities of the 21st century.

Dirac Biosciences’ innovative solution

Dirac’s gene circuits aim to sense cancer biomarkers associated with poor prognosis and metastasis development and treat only diseased cells. It enables a targeted response to specific activity happening inside a cell or in its external environment.

Competitive advantages

Capacity to design next-generation therapeutics that address cancer in a faster and more cost-efficient.

Low toxicity profile due to the ability to distinguish between healthy and diseased cells.

Founders

Dirac Biosciences was the 1^st start-up to be launched by our biomedical studio in Brussels. It has been co-founded by eureKARE, Technical University of Darmstadt, and built on the innovative research of Prof. Dr. Heinz Koeppl.

Prof. Dr. Heinz Koeppl

Founder

Since January 2014 Heinz Koeppl is a full professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at TU Darmstadt with a co-affiliation at the Department of Biology. Prior to that he was a SNSF assistant professor at the Automatic Control Lab of ETH Zurich and a group leader at IBM Research – Zurich.