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Traditional radiation therapy has not changed much over the past 50 years. It uses wide beams that kill cancer cells but also harm healthy tissue. CollimateHealth aims to improve this and has raised €6 million to advance its solution.
CollimateHealth GmbH has closed an oversubscribed seed round with support from VP Venture Partners, Positron, XISTA Science Ventures, High-Tech Gründerfonds, and caesar. The company aims to treat its first patients by the end of 2028.
“Shrinking the medical beamline of a synchrotron into a system with a footprint of less than 10 square metres is a genuine deep-tech moonshot,” Hans Maria Heÿn, CollimateHealth’s chief executive, says.
Radiation therapy is part of about half of all cancer treatments worldwide, but its main limitations have not changed much. Newer methods are now attracting more investment.
Since 2005, HTGF has supported more than 800 startups and is one of Europe’s most active deep-tech seed investors. Munich is also becoming a stronger deep-tech hub, with TUM spinouts like Sitegeist raising major investments, such as a €4 million pre-seed round earlier this year.
CollimateHealth was co-founded in 2025 by Stefan Bartzsch, a professor and chief scientific officer, and Johanna Winter, chief technology officer. Both are TUM researchers who spent almost ten years developing the core science before starting the company.
Instead of the wide beams used in standard radiotherapy, the company uses arrays of X-ray beams that are only tens of micrometres wide, about as wide as a human hair.
At this small scale, tumours treated with microbeams undergo a robust form of cell death that activates the immune system. This effect could reach beyond the treated area. The narrow channels in tumour tissue also help drugs enter the tumour more effectively, which could make chemotherapy and immunotherapy more effective.
Other cancer immunotherapy startups, such as CimCure (backed by Positron), are also exploring this combination, but they use different methods.
The main engineering challenge has been the hardware. Producing microbeams at the required dose usually requires a third-generation synchrotron, a particle accelerator as large as a football stadium. Only a few of these exist worldwide for medical research.
CollimateHealth says it has reduced the needed beamline to less than 10 square metres. If this is correct, it could allow clinical use in more places, not just a few specialist centres.
The closest similar new radiation technique is FLASH therapy. It also tries to reduce harm to healthy tissue, but it does so by using higher dose rates rather than changing the beam shape. FLASH does not create the immune activation effect that CollimateHealth reports.
The two methods might work well together, but there is no large-scale clinical data for either, and the regulatory process remains unclear.
The company works with academic partners such as TUM University Hospital rechts der Isar, Helmholtz Institute Mainz, Forschungszentrum Jülich, the Institute of Cancer Research, and The Royal Marsden Hospital in London. CollimateHealth also won the Falling Walls Award and the MedTech Ideator Award at Best of Biotech Vienna, both in 2025.
“What makes this technology compelling is not just its potential in radiation oncology — it is what it might unlock in combination with immunotherapy,” says Valentin Piëch, managing director of VP Venture Partners.
The €6 million will fund CollimateHealth’s first clinical prototype and the preclinical data required for regulatory approval. The company has spent the last three years testing whether a compact machine can transform cancer treatment, and this funding will help determine whether it can do so.
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