Academic research-based startups raised £2.5 billion in equity investment in 2021 and British angel investment is showing signs of recovery too. Oxford Nanopore Technologies has published its first full year results after becoming a publicly traded company. In short, not too good, but not too bad either. Meanwhile, Illumina has won a battle in courts against BGI, although this advantage will not last for long. Another well-deserved advantage: Alchemab Therapeutics is going to use the most powerful computer in UK. Looking across the pond, Sangamo Therapeutics is starting clinical trials for the first CAR-Treg therapy that makes it to patients, so we will need to look at Quell Therapeutics in a a few weeks. Question: should early-stage biotech startups aim for single-asset IPOs? The debate is set in the Interesting reads section. Let’s dive in!

Cambridge-based Sano Genetics has raised $11 million series A. The funding round was led by MMC Ventures and seconded by Episode 1, Seedcamp, and several angel investors. The startup has developed a platform to connect patients with the same rare, chronic diseases with personalised medicine providers. The funding will be used to expand its platform to 50 diseases over 6 countries, and expand operations to US and Europe.

Oxford Nanopore Technologies has shared its first full-year results since becoming a public company in October 2021. The sequencing company had losses by £106 million despite revenue increasing by £20 million (£114m in 2020; £134 in 2021), and market capitalisation slumped from £5 billion (Oct-21) to £3.31 billion.

Neuroscience technology company Cambridge Cognition has secured £1 million deal with to 10 pharmaceutical company to develop digital cognitive assessments for phase III autoimmune disease trial.

Record funding for university spin-outs in 2021. According to a report elaborated by Parkwalk Advisors, academic research-based startups raised £2.5 billion in equity investment in 2021. This represents a 69pc increase from the £1.5 billion in the previous year and 5-fold increase from 2012. Remarkably, a record 40% of the deals involved international investors. Top 10 spin-outs by investment volume are Oxford Nanopore Technologies (£195m), Graphcore (£162m), Exscientia (£162), Vaccitech (£121m), Quell Therapeutics (£117m), Gyroscope Therapeutics (£108m), pepGen(£81.0m), bit.bio (£77.0m), Evox Therapeutics (£69.2m), Cambridge Epigenetics (£64.6m), followed by AviadoBio, Amphista Therapeutics, Synthesia, Enough, and Phoremost.

British angel investment shows signs of recovery after activity dropped during 2020, according to a recent study published by Beauhurst. The number of equity investments peaked in 2019 (241 deals), dropped to 218 in 2020, and has raised to 229 deals. The UK top 10 most active angel networks (2011-2021) are Envestors, Minerva Business Angel Network, Cambridge Angels, 24Haymarket, Archangels, Equity Gap, Newable Ventures, Kelvin Capital, and OION.

Business Insider has published a good overview of the leading biotech seed investors, using data from Pitchbook 2021. The filter is set for who invest the most, not for who does it better. In alphabetical order: Alexandria Venture Investments, Cantos Ventures, Civilization Ventures, Connecticut Innovations, Connecticut Innovations, Fifty Years, First Round Capital, Founders Fund, KdT Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, Novo Holdings, OrbiMed, Pillar VC, Playground Global, RA Capital, Sofinnova Partners, SOSV, Y combinator and 8VC.

Alchemab Therapeutics has been selected to harness the power of the UK’s most powerful supercomputer, NVIDIA DGX Cambridge-1 SuperPOD. The research will focus in gaining greater understanding of their proprietary neurology and oncology datasets.

Cambridge-based Riverlane to lead UK consortium to create a system capable to controlling hundreds of qubits simultaneously across different sets of quantum hardware. The £6.8 million project is funded by Innovate UK and includes Quantinuum, Oxford Ionics, SEEQC, Mind Foundry, among others.

Acacia Pharma to be acquired by New Jersey-based  Eagle Pharmaceuticals for nearly $104 million. Acquisitions happens at a critical point for Acacia’s finances and it will require additional $115 million of additional cash to fund operations to break-even.

Government’s decision to deprioritise (sic) Oxford-Cambridge Arc would imply £50 billion loses by 2030.

Oxford Biomedica has appointed Dr. Ravi Rao as Chief Medical Officer (former senior roles at Orphan Biovitrum(Sobi), CMO at Aeglea Biotherapeutics, GlaxoSmithKline and Roche Pharmaceuticals).

Copenhagen-based SNIPR BIOME to open UK (London) and US (Boston) offices. The company applies its proprietary CRISPR/Cas platform to selectively eradicate microbial pathogens and remodel microbiome for oncology applications and other immunotherapies.

Cambridge-based Arecor Therapeutics has been granted pivotal U.S patent (US11278624) protecting novel formulations of their proprietary insulin products.

California-based Sangamo Therapeutics is dosing first ever patient with CAR-Treg therapy. The study is recruiting patients who have received a kidney transplant and are at risk of rejecting the transplant. Long term focus includes multiple sclerosis and inflammatory bowel disease. Sangamo acquired the French biotech TxCell for $84 million in December 2018, which specialised in regulatory T cells. Sangamo’s first-in-class therapy aims to harness the power of edited T-reg cells in calming down the immune system, so it does not perceive the new organ as a foreign threat. Sangamo is the first but will not be the last. To our knowledge, at least 7 biotechs are working on CAR-Treg therapies, including Sonoma Biotherapeutics ($265 million series B, August 2021), and UK-based Quell Therapeutics ($156 million series B, November 2021).

London-based Huma to acquire AstraZeneca digital health arm (AMAZE). AstraZeneca will become a Huma shareholder in a partnership to double down in digital-first patient care. Huma has developed a decentralised clinical trial platform that received input from patients and healthcare systems. It has more than 1.8 million active users across more than 3,000 hospitals and clinics.

Cambridge-based Mursla secured mentorship support from Roche Diagnostics for novel liver disease technology. Mursla has developed a novel multi-omics exosome characterisation platform, ExoPheno, and aims to develop a liquid biopsy that can detect early-stage hepatocellular carcinoma. The company was incorporated in 2017 and has not disclosed funding bodies.

Illumina wins extended US ban on BGI Genomics gene sequencer sales, after court decides sequencing chemistry infringes Illumina’s patents. The decision means BGI is banned form selling its CoolMPS sequencers in US until Illumina certain patents expire in August 2022.

There is a bit of a debate going on in regards to whether early-stage biotech startup should aim for single-asset IPO. In favor of the proposition is Bruce Booth, partner at Atlas Venture, who wrote a blog post on the matter. Roberto Belliniwrote a very good twitter thread, as $BLU is in fact a single asset public company. Brad Loncar made his point too, partially opposing the proposition. It all started here.

England’s Lords approved gene editing.

Cell & Gene Therapy Catapult published the National Cell and Gene Therapy Vision for the UK, a document funded by Innovate UK, Astellas Gene Therapies, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Gilead and Novartis.

Andrew Beam, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at Harvard University, and Founding Head of Machine Learning at Generate Biomedicines (et al.) has published Part I - Extracting the Hidden Principles of Biology with Machine Learning. It is easy to follow and leaves you waiting for Part II.

Food for thought: Altos Ventures has published a post addressing the classic question set from Jack McDonald lessons at Stanford: How do you know that a new investment is going to generate great returns? How do you know if a founder can grow to become a great leader? How do you know, after a huge gain, if you should continue holding? How do you know when to sell or double down?