Oxford Uni collaboration Scenic Biotech secures funding for its ‘genetic off-switch’
pharmafile | June 6, 2017 | News story | Manufacturing and Production, Research and Development | University of Oxford
The University of Oxford has joined forces with the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) in an international collaboration known as Scenic Biotech, which aims to tackle cancer and other diseases on a genetic level.
The spinout has now raised €6.5 million in Series A funding in a round co-led by Dutch life sciences investor BioGeneration Ventures (BGV) and INKEF Capital. The financing will drive the development of a promising new immunotherapy technology, called its ‘genetic off-switch’, as Thijn Brummelkamp, Professor at the Netherlands Cancer Institute and Co-Founder of Scenic Biotech, explained:
“With this technology we can experimentally assess nearly all genes that impinge on any cellular process with high precision and sensitivity. For the first time, we can now systematically identify genes that suppress processes that go awry in disease. These genes can serve as starting points for drug development and discovery to rebalance a variety of diseases. Our first in-house lead program that resulted from the Cell-Seq technology is in the immuno-oncology space and we will add additional programs in other indications, in particular in rare genetic diseases, in the next two years.”
Sebastian Nijman, Associate Professor of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at Oxford University and Co-Founder of Scenic Biotech, added:
“With this financing from a strong Anglo-Dutch venture capital syndicate, we will build the company to discover and develop a completely new class of therapeutic targets. Just as gene mutations can cause disease, we now know they can also protect us from disease. However, this insight has not yet been used for target discovery as the identification of such disease suppressing genes has been essentially impossible. Our new technology can now unlock this ‘dark matter’ of our genome.”
Matt Fellows
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