The founder of CellTrack, who won this year’s Pressure Chamber pitch contest in Madison, will use an upcoming trip to Silicon Valley to “warm up investors” for a coming $5 million seed funding round.
Victor Santoro Fernandes is a postdoctoral fellow in UW-Madison’s Medical Physics Department and CEO of the early-stage startup, which has developed technology for assessing the likelihood that cell therapies will work for cancer patients. It’s based on a PET scan approach, offering a platform that can essentially act as a companion diagnostic for clinicians.
“In the field of radiopharmaceuticals, they call this radiotheranostics,” Santoro Fernandes said in a recent interview. “So we’re calling this cell theranostics for the field of cell therapies, that’s where we’re going.”
CellTrack is currently running pilot projects for its first clients with an eventual goal of clinical application, but the way to get there is “of course through drug development,” Santoro Fernandes explained.
“A companion diagnostic, before it becomes a clinical tool, it is a drug development tool with the clinical trials … what comes before clinical trials is pre-clinical trials, right, and that’s the path we’re taking,” he said. “Our first customers are the drug developers, and our product [will] aid them to develop their cell therapies.”
The company is currently raising a $600,000 pre-seed round with $400,000 already committed to fuel initial efforts and get the business off the ground.
By taking the win during last week’s Pressure Chamber competition, Santoro Fernandes earned a spot on the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce’s fall trip to Silicon Valley, where he’ll sit down with venture capital firms.
“So when I go there, I’ll start to warm up investors for our next round, which is going to be a $5 million investment round … the money we’re raising will go to co-sponsoring clinical trials with one of our partners and prove CellTrack’s technology in humans,” he said.
He’s been a part of the Madison startup community for about four years, and had started connecting with organizations like the startup accelerator gener8tor, BioForward and the chamber while finishing his PhD. Santoro Fernandes was actually in the audience for last year’s Pressure Chamber, where he realized he wanted to take part himself.
“I was sitting there in the audience, I was like ‘Okay, I need to prepare to come up here next year and try my best hand at this thing,’” he said, adding “I’ve been planning for this competition for over a year, so having won it felt really good.”
He added: “I was running alongside some great startups with a lot of potential. I was really impressed by what they were presenting there, so it makes for a high-level competition.”
CellTrack was a “direct outcome” of the Medical Physics Department’s entrepreneurial fellowship initiative, a two-year postdoctoral program awarded to Santoro Fernandes to help commercialize IP and research coming out of the department.
“I think that program needs to be in the spotlight, because it’s really allowing young, savvy entrepreneurs to have the space they need to go and pursue bigger and bolder ideas,” he said.
