Hollandbio welcomes Tzu Cancer Therapeutics as a new member

Hollandbio connects, represents, and supports the Dutch life science sector. We are very proud that we already represent 260 companies: from start-ups, small and medium-sized companies to large companies, active in health, food, or the biobased economy. Today, we are happy to introduce Tzu Cancer Therapeutics as a new member! This biotech start-up operates from its headquarters at the Amsterdam Science Park (Matrix I) and was founded by biotech entrepreneurs Ronald Plasterk, René Beukema, and Ronald Brus. The company aims at developing innovative technology to isolate and characterize circulating tumour cells (CTCs) from the blood of cancer patients and use molecular profiling of CTCs as a starting point for novel cancer therapy.

Tzu

The name of the company is derived from the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, who wrote 2500 years ago in his book ‘The art of war’: “Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be defeated.” Cancer patients ultimately die from metastatic disease, which is a result of the spread of cancer cells via the blood. Deep molecular knowledge of the cancer cells that have the capacity to metastasise is key to developing new cancer therapies.

First steps

Over the last months, Tzu Cancer Therapeutics has built up a team of 8 professionals (and growing)  with backgrounds in genomics, molecular biology, data science, and bioinformatics. The company has established a laboratory setup to handle cancer cells from patient samples and to generate DNA and RNA sequencing from those cells. Since for each single cancer that is characterised, enormous amounts of data are generated, there is a strong emphasis on bioinformatics processing of the data. Therefore, Tzu has built computational infrastructure to develop tools for the analysis of cancer sequencing data and sift through that data to identify cancer drug targets

Personalized Cancer Therapy

The ultimate goal of Tzu is to transform the vast amount of genetic data of circulating tumour cells into novel therapies. Since cancer cells highly differ from patient to patient, we focus on personalized therapy development, which is tailored to the individual characteristics of a patient’s tumour.

Tzu Cancer Therapeutics is excited to join HollandBio and connect to other companies in the biotech space.

For more information about Tzu Cancer Therapeutics, please visit their website: www.tzu.nl