An ICMAB-led project won the Santander X Spain Awards 2026. Banco Santander announced the winners and the project LINCATH, led by the NanoCIM Group, was one of them. These awards recognize a new generation of entrepreneurial projects, startups and scaleups seeking to turn innovative solutions into high-growth businesses. The awards ceremony took place during the Valencia Digital Summit, an international event leader in its sector bringing together researchers, companies and investors.
A total of 30 projects reached the final of the Santander X Spain Awards, competing across three categories: University, Startup and Scaleup. Following presentations before three juries made up of members of the entrepreneurial and investment ecosystems, nine final projects were selected as winners.
LINCATH, winner of the University category
The winner in the University category was LINCATH, a project led by ICMAB Researchers. The team proposes a new approach to neutron capture therapy (NCT) based on the selective delivery of lithium, with the potential to improve the selectivity and effectiveness of current therapeutic strategies for cancer treatment.
Esperanza Medina, member of the winning research group, said: “I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the jury for recognizing a project as disruptive as ours, and to highlight the high level of development achieved by all the finalists, as well as everything we have learned from them. At NanoCIM, we are a small group, but we have a strong team. Gerard comes up with highly disruptive ideas in the field of particle therapies that may sound like science fiction, but we are fortunate to have brilliant researchers who can turn them into promising experimental results. These awards are just the first step forward, and we hope to achieve many more milestones in the future — we are already working on it!”
What’s next for these projects?
The winning projects will now go on to compete in the Santander X Global Awards, alongside leading companies selected in seven other countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Portugal, the United Kingdom and Uruguay.
About SSC-NanoCIM
Cancer is one of the most relevant diseases worldwide because of its incidence, prevalence and mortality. During the past decades, considerable efforts have been devoted to understand the origin of the disease, find early detection methods that could improve the survival rate of cancer patients or develop treatments and devices that could reduce or eradicate cancer. The application of nanotechnology for the rational design of biomaterials is providing alternative solutions to classical treatments, thus expanding the toolbox available for biomedical imaging and therapy. Nanomaterials offer a unique platform to adjust essential properties such as solubility, diffusivity, blood-circulation half-life, pharmacokinetic profile and cytotoxicity. Nanoencapsulation of biomedically relevant payloads into porous materials is of special interest for the development of contrast agents and smart therapeutic systems. Most of our research activity is in the area of nanooncology, by developing nanomaterials for both diagnosis and treatment of cancer.
From the wide range of nanomaterials available, our focus is on the exploitation of the unique properties that both, carbon and inorganic nanomaterials offer. When combined, the synergies of both types of materials results in novel or enhanced properties that are of interest not only in the biomedical field but also in other research areas as highlighted below.
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