IKAN BIOTECH S.L.

Their core work

IKAN Biotech, trading as The Zebrafish Lab, develops zebrafish-based avatar models for personalized cancer treatment. Their core technology involves implanting a patient's tumor cells into zebrafish embryos to create living, real-time test platforms that predict how that specific cancer will respond to different drugs — before the patient receives treatment. This approach bridges the gap between conventional cell-culture drug screening and slow, expensive mouse models. The company is a specialist preclinical CRO (contract research organization) serving oncology researchers, hospitals, and pharmaceutical developers who need rapid, patient-specific drug sensitivity data.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Both H2020 projects share an identical scientific objective — the zebrafish avatar platform for personalized cancer therapeutics — so there is no meaningful pivot in research direction across the two projects. What the timeline does reveal is a deliberate commercialization trajectory: the 2016 SME Phase 1 grant (€50k) served as a feasibility and business case validation, which then unlocked the 2017 SME Phase 2 grant (€2M) for full product development and market entry. The company was not exploring different research directions; it was scaling a single, focused technology from proof-of-concept to market-ready service.

IKAN Biotech followed a deliberate Phase 1 → Phase 2 SME Instrument path, suggesting that by the end of ZEBRAONCOFISH (2020) they were transitioning from EU-funded development into commercial service delivery — likely operating as a fee-for-service preclinical CRO for oncology clients.

How they like to work

IKAN Biotech leads every project it enters — both H2020 grants were coordinated solely by the company, with no consortium partners recorded. This is characteristic of the SME Instrument scheme, which is designed for single-company applications rather than multi-partner consortia. Any future collaboration would likely position them as a specialist technology provider or subcontractor within a larger consortium, rather than a natural consortium builder.

IKAN Biotech has no recorded consortium partners from its H2020 participation, a direct consequence of the solo-applicant SME Instrument funding model. Their collaborative network, if any, exists outside EU project structures — likely through hospital partnerships, pharma clients, or academic collaborations not captured in CORDIS data.

What sets them apart

IKAN Biotech occupies a very specific niche: rapid, low-cost, patient-specific in vivo cancer drug testing using zebrafish — faster than mouse PDX models and more predictive than cell lines. The "The Zebrafish Lab" brand signals deliberate positioning as a specialist, not a generalist CRO. For a consortium building in oncology, immuno-oncology, or precision medicine, they offer a differentiated preclinical validation capability that most academic or industrial partners cannot provide in-house.

Highlights from their portfolio

• ZEBRAONCOFISH
  The flagship project — a €2M SME Phase 2 grant, one of the more competitive EU funding instruments for SMEs, validating both the scientific merit and commercial potential of the zebrafish avatar platform.
• MY FISH CURE
  The Phase 1 feasibility grant that de-risked the concept and built the business case, demonstrating the company's ability to navigate the full EU funding pipeline from idea to scale.