74% of cancer patients experience cumulative adverse events with combination therapies. 80% of solid tumour patients are unresponsive to a monotherapy approach due to multiple resistance mechanisms.

OligoTune’s Technology is an siRNA conjugate platform designed for optimal pharmacodynamics, long lasting effects and immune activation. The platform will allow enhanced stability, improved potency and specificity and reduced immunogenicity.

Gene therapies currently in development focus on local lung delivery. For example, Cystic Fibrosis is caused by mutations in a single gene (CFTR), which results in thick sticky mucus that blocks the lung, the pancreas, the GI tract and other organs. Current treatments only allow local, temporary delivery, leaving diseases like CF untreated in the test of the body.

Panthura is developing a gene therapy for systemic cDNA delivery to target multiple organs, starting with Cystic Fibrosis.

Cell therapies offer huge promise in an array of diseases. However, there are three major challenges to bring pluripotent stem cells to market: tumorigenicity, immunogenicity, and heterogeneity.

Plurify is a disruptive platform to generate pure PSC-derived use of molecular logic to eliminate unwanted cells and a data-driven approach to understand culture composition and impurities, allowing oh purification and amplification in a single protocol within 3 months and ultimately an all-in-one solution to go directly from stem cells to pure cell products.

The bio-economy holds enormous potential: everything from fuel to therapeutics and food can be produced in modified bacteria, algae and yeast. The existing challenge is the unscalable, energy-intensive separation process, with high up-front capital costs of centrifuges and operational expense of liquid particle separation (often more than a third of total cost of production).

uFraction8 provides massively scalable bioprocessing without pre-concentration steps, filters, membranes or flocculants. It does not clog, does not have a theoretical size limit and significantly reduces energy costs, which currently represent the highest proportion of costs for producers.

60% of therapeutics are antibody-based. The discovery process is often longer than 18 months and costs hundreds of thousands of pounds, largely based on trial and error: testing of “libraries” of millions of antibodies against the target to see what “binds”, with no guarantee that the library contains the desired antibody.

Using a combination of robotics, state of the art machine learning and cell-free protein synthesis, Antiverse aims to be the first company in the world capable of developing antibody drug candidates in one day for any given antigen.

Patient safety in surgery is a serious global public health concern. Approximately 42.7 million adverse events occur in patients annually, with at least 7 million people a year experiencing disabling surgical complications and each OR delay costing $7000-$8000 per operating room day. There is an urgent need to upgrade current operating theatres.

Scalpel integrates data from healthcare records, AI-based analytics, sensors within the operating room and clinical actions to improve patient safety and operating theatre efficiency.

A significant component of biotech is manual preparation and growth of cells. This is expanding exponentially as therapeutics themselves become cell-based, most notably in cancer treatment. This is not just a significant time sink, it often involves significant waste, scope for human error and limits reproducibility.

Mytos have developed a system to fully automate cell manufacturing. Each machine completes the work of 10 scientists, whilst also reducing wastage and improving consistency.

Treatment resistance is responsible for 90% of cancer related deaths and consumes approximately 30% of the total cancer care spend.

ConcR combines cutting edge machine learning techniques and knowledge of tumour progression. Concr’s software provides drug developers with insights on appropriate in vivo models, patient populations and stratification biomarkers, as well as giving clinicians evidence-based outputs of patient-specific cancer progression, enabling therapy adaptation before treatment resistance arises.

Current microbiome companies view the microbiome as either healthy or diseased but this is not reflective of the fact that microbiome diseases occur gradually over time.

CC Bio are using synthetic biology to sense the presence of harmful bacteria and produce targeted therapeutic products to neutralise them. Their automated discovery platform enables rapid identification and prototyping of similar technologies for multiple other disease indications (<4 weeks), including skin health, gut health and dental health, as well as drug metabolism.

The gut microbiome has been implicated in a number of chronic diseases. Bacterial therapies offer promise to restore the healthy composition of the gut and treat disease, but many of these therapies do not effectively populate the gut. One hypothesis is that this consistent failure is due to native bacteriophage that prey on live bacterial therapeutics introduced to the gut.

Ancilia are developing a new class of engineered bacterial therapies, resistant to pathological phages, that effectively alter the human to treat the growing number of diseases linked to the microbiome.

Immunotherapy offers the potential to eradicate cancer, however today, only around 20% of patients with solid tumours can benefit from these cutting-edge treatments. Multiple factors contribute to this low level of efficacy, but chief among them is the existence of physical matrix barriers around the tumour that lead to the generation of an immune "excluded" microenvironment.

Neobe Therapeutics are harnessing the synthetic biology toolkit to engineer tumour-colonising bacteria that locally disrupt this microenvironment and enable the success of immunotherapies in current non-responders.

CAR-T therapy is a form of cancer treatment. These therapies currently only work well in blood cancers (less than 4% of total cases) and require therapeutic cells to be modified and grown outside the body. This highly complex and expensive process doesn’t work for everyone, results in cells of variable quality, and treatments that costs hundreds of thousands of pounds.

ImmTune Therapies is developing therapies that allow the patient’s body to develop these therapeutic cells themselves; which is considerably cheaper, and produces more effective products.

Therapeutic viruses offer huge potential to treat solid tumours but are typically destroyed rapidly by the patient’s immune system. Being limited to intratumoral injection, researchers have struggled for decades to safely and effectively harness this power, restricting their clinical use.

Stratosvir is developing improved viral immunotherapy, engineered to allow systemic delivery by avoiding immune clearance. This allows their cancer-killing virus to deliver medicinal payloads within the tumour to stimulate and reprogram the immune system to attack and destroy cancer.

Every cancer undergoes an evolutionary process which generates millions of mutationally and biologically diverse cells. As a result, synthetic lethality therapeutics raised against specific driver mutations only work in a limited subset of patients and only work until the cancer evolution strikes again, with drug resistance arising within a few months.

Enedra harnesses the power of Synthetic Lethality and Advanced Computational Systems Biology, to discover the first therapeutics that work against the complexity, biological and mutational heterogeneity of cancer.