Cancer is a leading cause of mortality worldwide, accounting for nearly 10 million deaths in 2020. What is less well known is if medical research could reduce cancer mortality by just 10% it would be worth $5 trillion in the US alone.
The net gain would be especially large if we could reduce cancer mortality with new drugs, which are typically cheap to make once discovered. “A reduction in cancer mortality of this size does not seem beyond reach and the value of such a reduction in mortality far exceeds that of spending more on medical care today,” said Alex Tabarrok’s Launching the Innovation Renaissance report.
With new digital technology and evolving patient care models, there is potential to deliver faster cancer diagnoses and more precise treatments. This would continue the trends during the past three decades.
The American Cancer Society (ACS) published its annual report and found death rates by 2019 had dropped 32% from its peak in 1991.
The decline stems primarily from a drop in lung cancer deaths. The report found that people are living longer after a lung cancer diagnosis “because more people are being diagnosed at an early stage of the disease”, as well as the drop in smoking in the US, according to the ACS.
“Accelerating declines in the cancer death rate show the power of prevention, screening, early diagnosis, treatment and our overall potential to move closer to a world without cancer,” the ACS added.
The value derived from better cancer-related healthcare is part of the reason governments focus on research and startups. In 2016, the then-US Vice President Joseph Biden launched the Cancer Moonshot, an ambitious initiative to accelerate efforts to prevent, diagnose and treat cancer with the aim of making a decade’s worth of progress within five years.
Similarly, the European Parliament wants to see a boost to research, as part of a broader initiative to step up the fight against cancer. Its 27 member states represent 10% of the world population but account for four out of 10 cancer cases globally.
“It has to be cross-border research and we have to roll out the red carpet to these scientists rather than putting obstacles in their way, as we are in some other areas,” said MEP Pieter Liese during a plenary debate leading up to the vote on the European Parliament’s report seen by Science Business.
Member states should make stronger commitments to public-private cooperation and increase “by at least 20% the mobilisation of public research on therapeutic, diagnostic and screening cancer innovations”, the report said.
There are nine health partnerships in Horizon Europe, the European Commission’s (EC) main funding mechanism between 2021 and 2027, but none specifically tackle cancer, although it does have a mission on cancer that launched last year.
The EC’s Beating Cancer Plan has a €4bn budget and a common approach to cancer prevention, treatment and care to try and reduce the 20% variation in survival rates between member states.
Annual diagnoses of cancer in India, which is undergoing its own ‘moonshot’, is an estimated 1.9 million, the same number as in the US, although these numbers are likely a gross underestimation and at advanced stages, where treatment is more difficult.
The UK falls between these large populations. As of December 2015, there were an estimated 2.5 million people living with cancer in the UK and rising by around 375,000 new cases every year (2016-2018).
The UK’s research base, NHS medical system, startups ecosystem (see Oncology’s look book for startups) and corporate and philanthropic funding and development, means the number of people who survived five or more years after their diagnosis had increased by 21% in 2015. According to cancer charity Macmillan, the number of cancer survivors was projected to increase by approximately one million people per decade between 2010-2040.
Evolution of cancer care
For this to happen, therefore, requires looking at every stage of a cancer’s evolution:
- Development of inexpensive and efficient technologies for early detection, such as liquid biopsy, secreted proteins, internet-of-things sensors and genomic sequencing.
- Development of new treatment strategies for late-stage and recurrent cancers, using technologies such as 3D patient-derived organoids, advanced immunotherapies, including novel Car-T cell therapy and genome editing with CRISPR.
- Analysis of the efficacy of the applied treatments and genetic patterns that may serve as biomarkers to predict disease recurrence, metastasis and drug response.
- The capacity to identify alternative targets and interventions through personalised medical technologies such as genomics, synthetic biology, sensors and artificial intelligence.
Cancer detection
Francis deSouza, CEO of Illumina, a US-listed genomic sequencing company, in its annual results said: “We are seeing incredible acceleration of genomics in healthcare.”
Oncology testing is currently Illumina’s largest clinical market, albeit its market power has brought with it criticism of its blood cancer tests – and peers are ramping up their own tests.
Last year, Grail launched Galleri, the first multi-cancer early detection blood test to be clinically validated in a screening population. Galleri can detect more than 50 types of cancer.
University of Oxford researchers have devised a non-invasive and inexpensive blood test that can identify cancer in patients with
non-specific symptoms.
James Larkin, researcher on the report at Oxford, said: “Cancer cells have unique metabolomic fingerprints due to their different metabolic processes. We are only now starting to understand how metabolites [natural chemicals] produced by tumours can be used as biomarkers to accurately detect cancer.”
Outside of the bloodstream, UK-based MDL offers practical optical coherence tomography dermatology applications to spot melanomas on the skin, while Huma combines data from biomarkers with predictive algorithms, both to help monitor patients, and uses the same technology to help researchers and pharmaceutical companies run clinical trials.
Treatment and Surgery
Cancer treatments tend to fall in two camps – targeting the growth inside the body to shrink, kill it or prevent further growth, and surgery to remove a tumour.
For the former, attention has been focused increasingly on cancer gene therapy, such as PsiOxus and Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR)-T cell cancer therapy, an experimental treatment turning immune cells into tumour-killing cells. CAR-T cells are shown to hold back the disease for more than a decade and remission rates recorded as high as 94% for certain cancer types, such as leukaemia. In the UK, the field is led in terms of venture funding by Immunocore (see Table 1: UK-based startups raised more than $100m).
So far this year, other startups have continued to bring in the money. Epsilogen, a UK-based developer of immunoglobulin E antibodies to treat cancer, has raised £30.75m in its series B round led by Novartis Venture Fund.
Elsewhere, in the US, Teclison raised $5.9m to try and induce tumour necrosis, while Simcha Therapeutics raised $40m in a round led by SR One Capital Management to develop cytokine-based cancer immunotherapies.
But many of the active investors, such as Bayer are based outside the UK.
Analysis and alternatives
One way to limit cancers’ growth or recurrence is to, effectively, have the body start again.
Altos Labs, a well-funded UK and US-based startup, is working on biological reprogramming technology to essentially prolong human life.
But before this can happen, being able to monitor specific cancer’s growth requires close analysis in a laboratory.
UK-based Pear Bio has created an “organ on chip” that recreates how cancer cells behave in their native environment and by using 3D imaging it can analyse the potential resistance to drugs, allowing oncologists to find the medication that is most likely to work on the patient.
In addition, patients and their families will require support as they learn to live with cancer. My Personal Therapeutics, a UK-based company, offers personalised care to cancer patients with access to around 2,000 FDA-approved drugs to try and identify which combinations of drugs would help to treat the patient, while Vine Health brings intelligent digital technology to support people going through cancer treatment.
In the US, Jasper Health offers a cancer care navigation platform after raising $25m in its series A round.
Immunotherapy
Oncology today is a profession emboldened, after decades of targeted government funding and as pivotal insights into genetics and immunotherapy begin making their mark, according to reporter Callum Cyrus in his in-depth look at oncology spinouts for Global University Venturing (GUV) in 2019.
Paul Ashley, the head of licensing and ventures for life sciences at University of Oxford’s tech transfer office, Oxford University Innovation (OUI), said: “We have an early-stage drug discovery initiative called Lab282, which looks at new drug discovery projects from the university. Around a third of our applications have been oncology projects.
“There are a good number of early-stage ideas, potential new targets and new insights into the biology of disease states that are exciting, but these can be some way off development into products or treatments. The university also has great examples of innovations and discoveries that are at the cutting edge of immuno-oncology and some of the more developed approaches to treating cancer.
“I am in tech transfer, so I am an inherent optimist. Immuno-oncology is an incredibly busy field with many clinical trials going on at the moment. People are looking very innovatively at how to make these new types of treatment more bespoke, more personalised and combine them with some understanding of the disease to create the best chance of success.
“Collectively, this represents a fairly big step change [for cancer treatment]. Also, with a better understanding of genomics and the ability to have many subsets or cohorts of patients, it means one can only hope this is an approach that is going to have some success.”
Immunotherapy, in particular, appears on the threshold of a stunning success, as the idea of equipping immune system blood cells with enough firepower to thwart what is known as cancer’s immunosuppressive environment gains traction.
Next-generation medicines
The UK’s NHS pledged to expand its range of next-generation medicines, building on the provision of Roche’s Herceptin for HER2-positive breast cancer, which includes an immunotherapeutic element, in 2017.
Also in 2017, US regulator the Food and Drug Administration approved pharmaceutical firm Novartis’s first chimeric antigen receptor engineered T-cell therapy (Car-T), Kymriah, for treating patients up to 25 years old with refractory or relapsed precursor acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.
Car-T is one of immuno-oncology’s most promising advances. The technique involves showing tumour antigens to a patient’s guardian white blood cells – known as T-cells – so they can recognise and attack the same antigens on the surface of cancerous cells.
Work in the same area has led to the emergence of what is termed genetically-modified T-cell receptor (TCR) therapy, which differs in that it aims to remove the tumour’s protection against T-cells through gene modification, rendering them vulnerable to attack by antibodies or small molecule drugs. Both approaches have generated considerable excitement, and, looking back over GUV’s case studies from 2014, immunotherapy spinouts have progressed furthest.
Oxford immunotherapy spinout Adaptimmune went public the following year for $191.3m, surpassing its $175.7m target. The company’s approach, dubbed NY-ESO TCR, utilises genetically modified TCRs trained to confront the tumour-specific antigen NY-ESO.
Adaptimmune has a strong business development relationship with drug maker GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), which activated an exclusive option on the spinout’s NY-ESO TCR therapy for indications including synovial sarcoma in 2018, after it had proved effective in treating solid tumours in what GSK claimed was a first for cell therapies. Adaptimmune has now turned its attention to its other TCR candidates, including treatments for hepatocellular carcinoma, bladder melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer.
GUV’s 2013 Investment of the Year, cellular therapy developer Kite Pharma, was snapped up by Gilead Sciences for $12bn in August 2017, months before its Yescarta T-cell product became the second
FDA-approved gene therapy, targeting certain forms of
non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Kite now operates as a wholly-owned Gilead subsidiary, adding its expertise to Gilead’s core offering, which had historically focused on HIV and Aids. To complete the circle, Kite now invests in spinouts, having acquired University of California San Francisco cellular medicine company Cell Design Labs in December 2017 and bought shares in University Medical Centre Utrecht-founded TCR drug developer Gadeta in July last year.
Acclaimed for GUV’s Deal of the Year in 2014, Car-T spinout Juno Therapeutics had amassed $310m of external funding within the space of 10 months, before it was sold to drug major Celgene for $9bn the following year. However, the company suffered a major setback in late 2016, when five patients died from brain swelling during clinical trials of its JCar015 Car-T candidate. It was tragic proof that the spectre of failure is never far from the surface for pharmaceutical developers.
Juno’s current lead drug, JCar017 for B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma, is currently recruiting patients for phase 1 clinical testing. The company’s platform extends research from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre, Seattle Children’s Research Institute and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre.
Away from T-cells, oncologists are targeting other immune system responses that could combat cancer in patients unresponsive to first-line immunotherapies. With only around 25% of cancer patients responding to immunotherapies at present, according to OUI’s Ashley, alternative techniques that demonstrate therapeutic credibility are likely to draw significant investor interest.
One alternative, crowned GUV’s 2018 Technology of the Year, is being advanced by Dundee and Stanford-linked Palleon Pharmaceuticals, which believes it has identified another route to stimulating the immune system’s ability to fight tumours.
Palleon’s thesis focuses on sugar molecules called glycans on cancer cells, which are known to deceive the body’s glycol-immune checkpoints as to cancer’s presence. Given that more immune cell subtypes present glycol-immune checkpoints than just T-cells, Palleon hopes the concept will help patients who have already failed T-cell treatment.
The concept has struck a chord with big pharma, which was well represented in Palleon’s $46.7m series A round. Four pharmaceuticals corporate venturing units – GSK’s SR One, Pfizer Ventures, Takeda Ventures and AbbVie Ventures – committed funding, as did Singaporean government-backed VC fund Vertex Healthcare.
Stifling immunosuppression is also the motivation for a fresh group of projects targeting the immune system mechanism responsible for converting nutrients into energy, known by biologists as the
immuno-metabolism.
Cancer stunts the immuno-metabolism by commandeering its nutrients, forcing immune cells to operate at a metabolic disadvantage. Immuno-metabolic drugs could therefore work alongside existing immunotherapies to improve their effectiveness. Spinouts pursuing immuno-metabolism research include Johns Hopkins University’s Dracen Pharmaceuticals, which closed a $40m series A round backed by Osage University Partners, Deerfield Management and I&I Prague in March 2018.
Dracen is developing both standalone and combination treatments centred on a class of glutamine antagonist. Coincidentally, the company is an example of academic cooperation across borders, advancing research from both Johns Hopkins University and the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague.
Also making headway in the immuno-oncology space are vaccines such as those conceived by Oxford’s Vaccitech, whose pipeline includes a candidate for metastatic prostate cancer. Vaccitech is one of a number of vaccine developers looking to exploit a biological vector ordinarily used by the adeno-associated virus to deliver an antigen that will drive an immune response.
For all the promise of immunotherapy, however, we are still to reach the point where its drugs satisfy the needs of most cancer patients. Engineering patient-derived T-cells is a complex approach unlikely to fit the circumstances of many, restricting the scope of their utility, according to Bobby Soni, a life sciences-focused partner at UK-based commercialisation firm IP Group.
He said: “There are some very large technical hurdles associated with what is out there. At the moment, Car-Ts are taken out of patients, modified and then put back in. That is doable, but it is not a process for all patients. We need to reach the point where we have allogenic T-cell therapies you are able to take off the shelf and give to patients, much as you would with any other biological products, rather than the complicated manufacturing process of autologous therapies where the patient is the source. That is a large technical hurdle, but when we reach that point where Car-T is allogenic that will be a huge leap for patients.”
Projects claiming an allogenic breakthrough are likely to make an impression. The aptly-named Allogene Therapeutics is a case in point, having filed for a $100m IPO in September 2018, just months after launching with $300m of series A funding from backers including University of California’s office of the chief investment officer of the regents and pharmaceutical firm Pfizer.
CytoSeek’s ‘holy grail’
The University of Bristol spinout is working on adapting cell therapies to solid tumours, according to a profile by Thierry Heles for Global University Venturing last year.
Adam Perriman, professor of bio-engineering at University of Bristol, gained his PhD from Australian National University in 2007 – not long before the global financial crisis threw the world’s economies into turmoil. At the time, he began pondering the benefits of spinouts, which were still a rarity.
“Things were looking rough in 2008,” he told Global University Venturing. “I was looking at the world and realised that the west does not really have anything left. If we do not start commercialising all this science – and very little was making it out beyond publishing at the time – then where does the value lie?”
Although long proven right, with spinouts an increasingly important component of knowledge transfer across the world, it was almost a decade before Perriman found his own perfect opportunity in 2017: CytoSeek.
CytoSeek’s technology, he explained: “Is centred on artificial membrane binding proteins. We design these protein constructs, which comprise an anchor domain that binds to the plasma membrane of cells and a functional domain that is the moiety we use to introduce added functionality to a cell.
“The functionalities that we introduce are associated with the challenges of treating solid tumours with cell therapies. For example, we can augment the cells to improve their performance in hypoxic environments – think of it as little scuba tanks we put on the cell. We can switch them on or off, which you want, for example, for T-cells.
“In practice, what we do is have the cells in vitro and put them in with a media, leave it on for 15 minutes, take it off and they are good to go.”
Proceed with caution
Initially, Perriman’s interest lay in stem cell therapies for the treatment of postmyocardial infarction, and CytoSeek’s original intellectual property was about modifying stem cells for treatment after a heart attack. But a consultant cautioned the market opportunity for cardiac cell therapies was not worth pursuing because there were no approved treatments and nobody really understood how they might work.
However, Perriman said, Car-T cell therapy did have “one approved product, with a second just being approved, but it did not work for solid tumours, so that gave us a clear industry focus. We also had a clear problem that we could address with our technology.”
The focus on solid tumours, Perriman explained, was because these accounted for around 85% of deaths by cancer. Car-T cell therapy, he said, also already worked for certain types of leukaemia.
“Our approach is a bit of a holy grail,” he said. “If we can adopt cell therapy to solid tumours, it is going to have a massive impact. This made it a good market with an unmet challenge, and our technology is extremely flexible and could address many different components.”
Carolyn Porter, chief executive of CytoSeek, clarified that there remained an opportunity for improving cell therapies in the field of liquid tumours, adding: “Although our preclinical programme is focusing on proving the technology works in the context of solid tumours that does not mean we might not do a partnership in the field of haematological malignancies in the future.”
She stressed that CytoSeek did not see itself turning into a company such as Autolus, the cancer-focused biopharmaceutical spinout from University College London that collected $150m in an initial public offering in 2018 and that had invested large sums into building its own manufacturing capabilities.
“We anticipate that we will be executing what is a classical biotech hybrid model, where we prove the technology by developing valuable products, engage in partnerships and then get acquired as our products move towards late-stage clinical trials,” she said.
When that time comes, it might not be completely the end of CytoSeek’s journey, according to Perriman. “The other opportunity for our technology is in regenerative therapies. It could well be that, as we have a platform technology, we carve these sections off. We have an amazing team and that is worth as much as the science,” he said.
Eyes on the prize
The technology also had applications in exosomes and there were underserved areas that the team might pursue in future under a different business model. For now, however, the eyes remained firmly on the price at hand and, following the spinout’s £3.6m seed round last month, CytoSeek had an 18-month to two-year runway to prove its technology and build its preclinical pipeline.
An immediate goal following the round was to double CytoSeek’s headcount, Porter said. The team counted five full-time members of staff, with another two due to join in June 20XX and Perriman on a part-time basis. The spinout also continued to rely on external consultants, Porter said.
The seed round’s size was impressive in a UK biotech context, but CytoSeek had offers for £4.5m on the table – having set out to raise only £3m. This gave the company the luxury of choice, said Porter: “It was important to bring on board investors with the capability to follow, such as Parkwalk Advisors. Science Creates Ventures (SCV) has ambitions to follow, but also Luminous Ventures. We were surprised by existing angel investors exercising pre-emption rights as well.
“We will be looking for either corporate VCs or strategic investors to join our existing investor group. We have proof of principle, but we really want to build our preclinical package to excite those types of investors as part of the next round.”
Of CytoSeek’s current shareholders, Harry Destecroix is one of the most intriguing. In 2018, Destecroix sold his Bristol spinout Ziylo, which was working on next-generation insulin, to pharmaceutical firm Novo in a deal that, milestone payments included, exceeded $800m. In a more unusual move, Destecroix licensed back certain rights as part of the acquisition and launched Carbometrics, which is working on non-therapeutic applications such as continuous glucose monitoring products.
Destecroix also went on to become a champion for the Bristol ecosystem, first launching pre-seed incubator Unit DX with support from the university and, in December last year, expanding with seed to series A-stage incubator Unit DY and a £15m venture fund called Science Creates Ventures. Together, Unit DX, Unit DY and the fund run under the Science Creates brand.
At the time of Science Creates’ launch, Destecroix said: “Where a discovery is made has a huge bearing on whether it is successfully commercialised. While founding my own startup, Ziylo, I became aware of just how many discoveries failed to emerge from the lab in Bristol alone.
“No matter the quality of the research and discovery, the right ecosystem is fundamental if we are going to challenge the global 90% failure rate of science startups and create many more successful ventures.”
CytoSeek became SCV’s inaugural investment but Destecroix had already personally invested in the spinout’s £1.19m pre-seed round in November 2019, when Parkwalk-managed University of Bristol Enterprise Fund, UKI2S and angel investors affiliated with Bristol Private Equity Club also injected capital.
Porter said: “Destecroix has phenomenal energy. When I was doing diligence on the role of CEO, I met him and his passion for the community and for CytoSeek was apparent. He has obviously been through an exit, which brings a network and an understanding of what you need to do to help prepare a business do that.”
Parkwalk installed investment director Cassie Doherty on the board of directors. Doherty spent more than 11 years with Parkwalk’s parent firm, IP Group, specialising in life sciences before her move in June 2019.
Porter added: “I should also mention Damian Marron, who joined our board as chairman just before the raise. He is a serial entrepreneur who has exited a number of cell therapy companies both through M&A and IPO transactions.”
Destecroix’s support, however, was critical not just for the expertise and capital, but also for that aforementioned Unit DX incubator. When the pandemic began, CytoSeek had been based within the university and had intended to eventually move into Unit DY – due to open later this year.
Covid threw a spanner in the works. She recalled: “We faced either mothballing the company or finding alternative facilities because I felt it would be extremely difficult to raise capital if we had not got onward progress with the science.”
CytoSeek did have a small foothold in Unit DX, renting office space for admin purposes and that connection proved very useful. “One company was furloughing its staff and another was moving back into the university to help with the covid-19 effort and we sublet space from both of them. Other space came up that we took on permanently,” Porter said.
Illustrating the challenges of the early pandemic days, Perriman recollected: “We hired a big van and moved our equipment in one day. It was incredible teamwork.”
It meant CytoSeek was able to continue working throughout lockdowns. The spinout rented more space than was needed to guarantee social distancing in the lab and Unit DX quickly enacted safety measures. “There was impact, as everywhere else,” he said, “but we mitigated a lot of the stress.”
Plans to move to Unit DY remained in place, Porter said and the spinout was staying in the Bristol ecosystem long-term. To a certain extent, the pandemic played into CytoSeek’s hand because London-based researchers were now looking for opportunities elsewhere, Perriman said.
Talent hotspot
Porter said: “There is a nucleus of expertise growing in the cell and gene therapy sector in the southwest, centred around Bristol, which is great for us as a company. We are actively trying to develop those relationships.
“Bristol – not just because of the investment and the energy of people such as Destecroix and the team at Science Creates, but also for us specifically in the cell and gene therapy sector – has a growing network and expertise that will keep us here and hopefully continue to enable us to attract people from London.”
Even with Perriman’s and Porter’s clear enthusiasm, CytoSeek would not have come to be without the initial grant funding it received from Innovate UK. The 4-Day MBA programme ended with a demo day, where Perriman met investors. But, Perriman said: “I did not want to take anyone’s money until I really knew what I was doing. The first Innovate UK grant, which was only £100,000, really was a point where we could spend some money and I wrote another handful of successful small grants to slowly build up the company.”
The grant, he said: “forces you to get started, which is important and to put in place some structure. We had an amazing monitoring officer – I got more out of the him than he got out of me.
“We ran the company without a CEO for the first year and a half. That was intentional – I could have named myself CEO, but we really wanted to hold that position open.”
Innovate UK then also took part in the pre-seed and seed rounds through UKI2S, managed by Midven – since acquired by long-time GUV partner Future Planet Capital.
Perriman said: “You have to be careful with grants, though, you can get trapped by their work programmes because it is milestone driven. You need to make sure that relationship is well established with your monitoring officer – if you are open and honest with them and you do need to pivot, they are generally fairly good. But if you are not careful it can be extremely laborious.
“Once the company is moving along, most grants – unless you are writing for more than £500,000 or close to £1m – are almost not worth writing unless it is strategic.”
It was a good programme, Perriman and Porter agreed and it ought to have had a bigger budget. The Bioindustry Association continued to lobby the government both for more non-dilutive and equity funding, Porter said. “For companies such as us, outside the golden triangle, it is really important,” she added.
Natural leaders
It is very easy to forget, when talking to Perriman and Porter that this is the first time for both leading a company as chief scientific officer and chief executive, respectively. Porter began her career as an academic, before moving into business development and corporate finance at companies including Novartis and Ernst & Young. She then joined Oxford University Innovation, where she spun out companies Evox and Vaccitech, which developed the technology underlying the Oxford/AstraZeneca covid-19 vaccine.
“What attracted me to tech transfer and why I ended up here was that I had big company experience, but I was really interested in early-stage companies,” Porter said. “When working in Novartis, we licensed in early-stage technologies and I was at that interface. I thought it would be cool to work in the spinout community and like many people who join tech transfer organisations it was my goal to get that experience of starting new companies and then jump into one, which is what I did eventually.
“The reason I chose CytoSeek is Perriman. He was a phenomenal salesperson and I felt we could have a lot of fun. If you do not have a team that works together effectively you can have a really good technology not go anywhere.”
She continued: “We have a great working relationship and we balance each other. That is true for the rest of the team as well, like our chief operating officer Ben Carter, who was one of Perriman’s PhD students. Perriman and Carter had already pushed the business significantly forward before I came on board.”
Porter was also interested in the Bristol ecosystem: “I was ready for something outside the golden triangle. In addition to working on CytoSeek, I have been talking to other companies in the ecosystem and trying to set up a cell and gene therapy network.”
Would Perriman do it all again? Yes, he replied, after all, CytoSeek’s creation was an intentional career move. “It is extremely exciting. I have that personality type; I am not the introverted professor in his lab and I am also practical.
“I am really fortunate to be a UKRI Future Leaders fellow and I have been on fellowships all the way through professorship, so almost all of my time is focused on research and development with little admin and a few lectures throughout the year. That is extremely important because otherwise something would have to give.
“Looking at clinical translation – taking a concept all the way through to treatment – is really rewarding. At the same time, I also like the raw creativity within a university research group. You can pursue the really mad ideas and the things that pop out from that are really innovative and almost certainly have legs for commercialisation.”
Of course, the focus remained on CytoSeek for now but, he added: “I am certainly not jaded from the process and I could definitely work with Porter again.”
Dynamic workplace
The bigger question, he pondered, was balancing the company workload with his academic position. “Sometimes I am asked by investors if I would be willing to walk away from my job. But universities are really dynamic places and help with idea generation, so I do not see a way where I would have to walk away from that. But you never know.”
It is not a decision he will have to face anytime soon anyway, Perriman said: “We are really excited about developing the next generation of cell therapies for oncology and solving the solid tumour problem.”
Both Porter’s and Perriman’s passion for and pride of CytoSeek, its team and the Bristol ecosystem, clearly shines through and with the resources in place to now build its preclinical pipeline, there is little doubt CytoSeek will have a great impact. It is hardly surprising that seed round was oversubscribed.
Oncology’s look book for startups
The UK government through its Department for International Trade scours the country for startups that might be fundable by venture investors from around the world.
In partnership with Global Corporate Venturing for a webinar at the end of February, DIT’s Bob Damms and Paul Morris selected a handful of cancer-focused startups to showcase to corporate venturing judges:
Oliver Keown, Intuitive Ventures
Alicia Irurzún-Lafitte, UCB Ventures
Lizzie Lee, McKesson Ventures
David Stevenson, Merck GHI Fund
Pierre Arsene presented Mursla as a liver and lung cancer testing company through a liquid biopsy of cancer cell excretions. Tumours shed cells into the bloodstream, but there are issues around identifying the tissue of origin for the cancer, which is where Mursla’s exosome biology is expected to help.
Magda Blanca at NovalGen showed how its immunoncology developed bispecific antibody therapies to target 20 cancers through the T-cells.
Kevin Dharliwal at Protheo was developing a CT scan biopsy to try and spot lung cancers early without killing the patient (12% of whom die on the operating table as the biopsy is taken). Protheo uses a micro-endoscope to capture an image of the tumour which can be tested immediately for whether surgery needs to be performed. Dharliwal described this as “personalised therapy for abnormal tumours”.
DIT is a subscriber and partner with Global Corporate Venturing
Bayer’s big leap
Germany-based drugs company Bayer’s corporate venturing unit, Leaps By Bayer, has reportedly invested more than $1.5bn from the balance sheet in the past six years and ahead of its planned move into Asia is stepping up activity in the rest of the world.
With more than 45 portfolio companies to date, Leaps is eyeing another eight or 10 investments this year as it places “fewer, but maybe bigger bets going forward,” according to the venture outfit’s leader, Jürgen Eckhardt, in an interview with Fierce Biotech.
Its deals this year include Gandeeva Therapeutics, a Canada-based biotech using cryogenic electron microscopy for drug discovery, in its $40m series A round; Indapta Therapeutics, a US-based biotechnology company developing an natural killer cell therapy platform for the treatment of blood and solid tumour cancers, in its $50m series A round; Metagenomi, another US-based gene-editing startup, which raised $175m in its series B round; and Celino Biotech, a US-based startup looking to automate the process used to create pluripotent stem cells, in its $80m series A round.
Operating outside of Bayer’s three main divisions of pharma, consumer health and crop science, Leaps has, therefore, targeted cell and gene therapy, gene-editing and cancer, neurodegenerative or autoimmune-focused biotechs.
This follows a solid track record. Bayer has co-founded companies including BlueRock Therapeutics, a cell therapy player now owned by Bayer. BlueRock launched in 2016 with the largest biotech series A at the time, $225m.
Seismic Therapeutic emerges
Seismic Therapeutic, a US-based immunotherapy discovery technology developer, formally launched this year with $101m in series A funding from investors including co-founder Timothy Springer, a professor at Harvard University’s Medical School.
Venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, which also featured internet technology group Alphabet’s GV unit, Boxer Capital, Polaris Partners, Samsara BioCapital, as well as Seismic’s other co-founders and management team.
Seismic has built a machine learning-equipped biologics development platform dubbed Impact, which incorporates structural biology, protein engineering and translational immunology to help drug developers accelerate the process of discovering therapeutic targets for autoimmune disease.
The company will use the money to take its two lead drug candidates, which target antibody and cell-mediated autoimmunity respectively, toward clinical trials and improve Impact’s machine learning capabilities.
Jo Viney, co-founder, president and chief executive of Seismic Therapeutic, said: “The time is right to move the needle in immunology, as advances in technology now enable us to discover medicines to address complex immune system biology in dramatically improved ways.
Springer and Debora Marks, also a professor at Harvard Medical School, are the “main” scientific co-founders of Seismic, according to Fierce Biotech, but the company also builds on research from Harvard’s Andrew Kruse, Rockefeller University’s Jeffrey Ravetch and Emory University’s Eric Sundberg.
Seismic is the latest venture for Springer, whose most successful companies to date have arguably been mRNA vaccine developer Moderna and gene-editing company Editas. His portfolio also includes biotech developer Tectonic Therapeutic and integrin drug developer Morphic Holding.
Viney and Alan Crane, another co-founder of Seismic, previously teamed up with the university’s David Sachs to launch Pandion Therapeutics. The autoimmune and inflammatory diseases-focused company was acquired by pharmaceutical company Merck & Co for $1.9bn in February 2021.
Springer said: “Biologics drug development has undergone extraordinary advances in recent years, and the advent of machine learning working in concert with structural biology and protein engineering offers an entirely new trajectory for creating innovative biologics medicines.”
Profile: Tony Hickson, Cancer Research UK
Cancer Research UK (CRUK) is a large charity that helps get treatments and cures for the various types of cancer to market through its commercial partnerships team. Tony Hickson is the chief business officer of CRUK, which has funded £2bn of research over the past five years, which is around 50% of all research in the UK.
Hickson, leads the commercial partnerships team responsible for commercialisation, ie turned into products and services to benefit cancer patients. In a Talking Tech Transfer podcast with Global University Venturing’s Thierry Heles, Hickson said: “It [cancer] kills nearly 10 million people every year. Our goal is to get 75% of people to survive cancer by 2034. Only about 50% of people survive cancer currently, so it is quite a lofty goal. Our unit, Cancer Research Technology (CRT), has taken 11 drugs to market so far over the past couple of years and brought in around £180m in royalties ploughed back into cancer research and our university partners in the UK. We have a US arm, which reflects the importance of America to pharma and oncology, and a synbio team which does reagents. Pharma and diagnostics get a lot of the attention but getting these reagents out of the labs and into the hands of researchers is important.”
CRT has a seed fund expanded to £30m. Overall, CRT has helped form more than 60 startups that have raised £800m in the past year alone, £2.3bn to date with 17 exits, through Impact Medicines fund managed with SV Health, a venture capital firm, that gives investment intelligence on what they need to see and that Hickson said was “like gold dust to us and we can use the seed fund or proof of concept funds to get the answers”.
The charity also runs the Cancer Research Accelerator with Medical Research UK, Capital Enterprise and Roche Diagnostics, as technologies, such as AI and big data, combine.
Hickson said: “The world of science is converging. We are going to see more of a biotech world joined with a big tech world of AI and big data in the future. It is inevitable. It is already happening.
However, while there is more money there remains an issue of culture – only 13% of researchers engage with CRT for translation to spinouts or commercialisation whereas it is aiming for more than 20%, according to Hickson.
