For years, the nanoparticles refused to go where Carlos Caro and his colleagues needed them to go. Then one experiment changed everything. Today, the team behind TarGLiO is trying to turn that laboratory breakthrough into something far more consequential: a new therapeutic possibility for people facing one of the most aggressive forms of brain cancer.
Science rarely follows a straight path. Dr Carlos Caro knows this well. His journey with what would become TarGLiO began in 2016, when he joined Dr María Luisa García Martín’s research group. Combining their expertise, they set out to tackle one of cancer’s greatest challenges: brain tumours.
The team developed magnetic nanoparticles designed to circulate long enough to reach a tumour. But despite years of research, one crucial problem remained: the nanoparticles were not reaching their target.
The experiment that changed the story
Cancer cells have an unusually high demand for glucose. The researchers wondered whether they could exploit that characteristic to help guide their nanoparticles towards the tumour. They incorporated a glucose derivative into their formulation. They tested it. And once again, the results were disappointing.
It would have been easy to interpret another unsuccessful experiment as evidence that the idea itself was wrong. Instead, the team started asking a different question: what if targeting the tumour depended not only on the nanoparticle, but also on the metabolic environment surrounding it?
They changed the experimental conditions. This time, something happened.
“After optimising the experimental metabolic conditions, we finally observed the result we had been working towards,” Carlos recalls. “The nanoparticles were able to reach and accumulate in the tumours.” It was, he says, their “eureka” moment.
But reaching the tumour was only part of the challenge. When exposed to an external alternating magnetic field, the nanoparticles could generate localised heat – a process known as magnetic hyperthermia. In their experiments, this produced a measurable effect on tumour growth. After years of uncertainty, there was finally proof that the underlying scientific idea could work. For Carlos and the team, however, that discovery created another question: would it remain an academic result, or could it one day reach patients?
“We couldn’t allow that,” he says of the possibility that the work might remain confined to research. That decision became the beginning of TarGLiO.
Taking on one of cancer’s hardest problems
Behind the sophisticated science lies a clinical reality. Glioblastoma is an aggressive brain tumour that infiltrates the surrounding tissue, making complete surgical removal extremely difficult. Current treatment typically combines surgery with radiotherapy and chemotherapy, but recurrence remains common and prognosis are poor.
TarGLiO is being developed around a radically different proposition: a targeted, non-invasive approach that uses magnetic nanoparticles designed to accumulate in the tumour and generate localised heat when activated by an external magnetic field. In much simpler terms: “a non-invasive treatment that may offer hope for patients with otherwise incurable brain tumours.”
For a technology still at an early stage of development, that word needs to be treated carefully. TarGLiO is not yet a treatment available to patients. Its encouraging results represent an in vivo proof of concept, and significant preclinical, regulatory and industrial development still lies ahead. But this is precisely where the story moves beyond the laboratory.
Because proving that something can work scientifically and turning it into something that can ultimately be used in healthcare are two very different challenges.
When scientists have to become entrepreneurs
For a time, Carlos says, the scientific team did not know how to make that transition. There were promising research and a belief that it deserved to progress. What was missing was a clear route from scientific discovery to a viable company. “There were moments of frustration and disappointment,” he says.
A turning point came at the Transfiere 2025 event, where the researchers discovered The Collider programme by Mobile World Capital. Through the programme, they met Silvia Gómez (TarGLiO’s CEO) and Erica Cantadori (TarGLiO’s COO). Today, the four form multidisciplinary founding team. Dr María Luisa García brings expertise spanning nanomedicine, magnetic nanoparticles, MRI, glioblastoma and in vivo tumour models. Carlos leads nanoparticle engineering and technological development. Silvia, brings deep-tech entrepreneurship, business strategy, financing and commercialisation expertise, while Erica contributes experience in finance, administration and innovation project management.
Carlos describes the team in three words: “Ready, committed and tireless.”
Perhaps more revealing, however, is the best piece of advice he says he has received: “Surround yourself with the right people.”
It is a lesson that has become inseparable from TarGLiO’s scientific journey. “Without a strong, multidisciplinary and aligned team, even the most promising technology cannot advance,” he says.
For researchers contemplating entrepreneurship themselves, Carlos makes much the same point. Scientific innovation, he argues, is only one part of building a company. Researchers also need people who understand business, regulation, financing and the long process required to translate a discovery into a product.
Building the bridge between proof and possibility
That transition is also why TarGLiO applied to the BRIDGE Genesis4LifeScience programme. The team has scientific proof of concept, but the next phase requires something academia alone cannot easily provide: funding, industrial expertise, scalable production capabilities, investor readiness and connections across the European biomanufacturing ecosystem.
Through the BRIDGE Business Bootcamp and mentoring activities, TarGLiO hopes to refine its value proposition and investment strategy, better understand what deep-tech investors expect and build relationships with mentors, industrial partners and potential collaborators.
It is one of the paradoxes of deep-tech healthcare innovation: a scientific breakthrough can answer one question while immediately creating dozens more. Can it be reproduced? Can it be manufactured at scale? Is it safe? How will it be regulated? Who will invest in taking it through the next stage? And eventually, the most important question of all: Can it help a patient?
One year from now
There is no promise of revolution. No suggestion that the hardest work has already been done.
“I would love to be able to say that we have continued advancing step by step, keeping the project alive and moving forward with determination,” says Carlos Caro.
He hopes the team will have secured the funding necessary to undertake the next stages of development and move TarGLiO further from promising scientific concept towards a tangible therapeutic solution. When asked what single healthcare problem he would solve tomorrow if he could choose any, Carlos does not hesitate. He would make aggressive brain tumours such as glioblastoma treatable diseases rather than life-limiting diagnoses.
TarGLiO is still a long way from knowing whether it can help make that future possible. But nearly a decade after Carlos entered a laboratory with an ambition to take on cancer, the nanoparticles finally know where they need to go. Now the challenge is to take the science with them.