The British biotech sector is celebrating a fantastic first quarter of 2022 as VC investment reaches record levels. Folks at Cambridge Innovation Capital and Blackstone Life Sciences have strong reasons too to be celebrating after raising oversubscribed funds. In contrast, biotech IPOs in British stock markets have not recovered yet. Companies keep going public, just not in the UK, and the Government is looking into it. Meanwhile, an interesting company, Forcefield Therapeutics, has emerged from stealth with the support from Syncona. Another Syncona-backed company, Autolushas been granted FDA’s RMAT for its CAR-T cell therapy. Believe it or not, subscription-based model has arrived to antibiotic discovery too and the UK is pioneering this system. Talking about crisis, friends at AbbVie are trying hard to surf Humira’s patent cliff, although in this case it is more of a Shakespeare drama than just a cliff. They may need to play a few times this week’s song, which, by the way, has a special message for you, dear reader. Let’s dive in!

British biotech sector raised £453 million in venture capital investment from Dec/2021 to Feb/2022, accounting for 33% of the total European biotech VC financing. Overall, the biotech ecosystem raised £481 million, lower than in previous years due to the decline in IPOs (£24.6 million Q1/2022 vs. £215 million Q1/2021) and follow-on investments (£3.6 million Q1/2022 vs. £279 million Q1/2021). In contrast, US and Chinese biotechs have seen a decrease in venture capital investments. US biotech startups raised £3.3 billion in Q1/2022 vs. £5 billion Q1/2021. China-based biotechs raised £553 million in Q1/2022 vs. £1.1 billion Q1/2021.  Top UK biotech VC deals were Ori Biotech (£74.5 million Series B), bit.bio (£63.3 million Series B), AviadoBio (£59.6 million Series A), EyeBiotech (£48.4 million Series A), and Engitix Therapeutics (£42.4 million Series A). Only two companies filed for IPO, TC Biopharm Holdings (clinical-stage immunotherapy company; NASDAQ, £13 million IPO) and Aptamer Group (aptamers discovery and development for custom services, diagnostics and therapeutics; AIM, £11 million IPO).

BenevolenAI is now trading on Euronext market (Amsterdam) as BAI. The listing follows merging with SPAC Odyssey Acquisition S.A. in December 2021. Despite the government efforts to make the UK a more suitable place for listing companies, BenevolentAI follows in the footsteps a long list of British biotech startups that where founded in the UK but have chosen to leave the country for their IPOs.

More on British biotechs listing abroad. OKYO Pharma has set terms for US $10 million IPO. The company plans to offer 1.9 million of American Depositary Shares (ADS), with each ADS representing 65 ordinary shares, at $5.24/ADS. OKYO’s lead drug candidate (OK-101) is a dry eye disease treatment currently in preclinical stage with IND submission expected for Q3/Q4 2022. OK-101 is a chemerin receptor agonist modified with a lipid anchor to decrease washout from tearing and blinking. It amis to reduce inflammation and neuropathic pain. Other company leads target ocular neuropathic pain, uveitis, and allergic conjunctivitis.

Epitopea has raised $13.6 million seed round led by Advent Life Sciences, CTI Life Sciences, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Fonds de Solidarité FTQ. The round was seconded by Novateur Ventures and the Harrington Discovery Institute/University Health Holdings. The company has developed a technology that identifies untapped and aberrantly expressed tumour-specific antigens (TAS), known as Cryptigens. The aim is to develop TCR-based immunotherapeutics, from vaccines to cell therapies. Cryptigens TAS have been discovered by Dr. Claude Perreault and Dr. Pierre Thibaultat the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer at Université de Montréal.

Forcefield Therapeutics has emerged from stealth mode. The company has raised £5.5 million seed round and is backed by Syncona. Forcefield Therapeutics is developing a pipeline of therapeutics to protect cardiomyocytes in order to retain heart function. The aim is to minimise the impact of myocardial ischemia (MI) and subsequent events potentially leading to heart failure. The company has a rather unique scientific approach. Based on the research carried our by Prof. Mauro Giacca, the aim is to inject the MI patient with three specific proteins that prevent cell-death related cascades in cardiomyocytes to progress.

MitoRx Therapeutics has raised an undisclosed amount in seed financing round. The round was backed by Wren Capital, Longevitytech Fund, UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund, the Fink Family Office, the Science Angel Syndicate Network, Oxford Technology Management, and other angel investors. MitoRx is developing therapeutics to reverse mitochondrial disfunction focusing on Duchenne muscular dystrophy and degenerative diseases. The company has announced the appointment of Glyn Edwards MBE as Chair of the Board.

Cambridge-based Axol Biosciences has raised extra $4.2 million for $9.2 million haul. The round was led by existing investors Calculus Capital, Par Equity and Scottish Enterprise with support from Meltwind and early investor Dr Jonathan Milner. The company provides iPSC-derived cells and characterisation services for life science discovery and the funds will be used to expand their iPSC products to cardiac, neuroscience, and immune cell modelling and screening markets.

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Cambridge Innovation Capital has raised $300 million for its oversubscribed Fund II and has reached $1 billion AUM. The fund is backed by around 50 institutional and strategic investors, and almost half of the funds come from UK-based investors. The Fund II has already made 6 investments, including Riverlane (quantum computing software), Pretzel Therapeutics (mitochondrial therapeutics), Salience Labs (photonic computing), and Epitopea (cancer immunotherapeutics). Remarkably, over half of Cambridge Innovation Capital investments come directly from Cambridge academics IP. CIC's unique position allows priority investments alongside Cambridge Enterprise Fund and take part in follow-on rounds.

Blackstone has raised oversubscribed $1.6 billion Life Sciences Yield fund. This is the first time ever the fund will invest only in products that have received regulatory approval for commercial use or in royalties tied to sales. The fund aims to complement the $4.6 billion fund raised in 2020 to finance drug development in the final stages of the regulatory process. Blackstone life-sciences arm has $6.2 billion under and aims to bring forward 25 to 30 pharmaceutical products and therapies.

Applications for Babraham Accelerator 2022/23 cohort will re-open on the 3rd May. 5 companies will be selected and mentored during 5 months.

The United Kingdom is the first country in the world to set a subscription-based model to tackle antibiotic-resistance crisis. England's National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), the NHS arm evaluating new medical technologies, has agreed to pay £10 million a year over the next decade to Pfizer and Shionogi for guaranteed supply of two new antimicrobial drugs. NICE has selected cefiderocol (Shionogi) for adults, and ceftazidime-avibactam (Pfizer) for children and complicated abdominal lung and urinary tract infections.

LabGenius has switched from GPUs to Graphcore’s IPUs to speed up their AI-based drug discovery platform. Developing a functioning model will take now less than two weeks, whereas it used to take about a month. LabGenius is now using used Graphcore’s standard PyTorch implementations of BERT, the natural language processing transformer model.

Oxford BioTherapeutics has granted exclusive license to Boehringer Ingelheim for novel oncological target. The undisclosed target that was discovered using Oxford BioTherapeutics’ proprietary OGAP® platform, which benefits from one of the world's largest proprietary membrane proteomic databases. OGAP® is optimised to discover an engineer antibody-related products (i.e. bispecific antibodies, CAR-T, T- cell and NK cell-mediated cytotoxicity (ADCC) or ADC therapeutics) to novel therapeutic targets. Milestone payment has not been disclosed.

TauRx Pharmaceuticals has announced the last patient in the blinded phase of their late stage clinical trial has completed the treatment. The clinical trial called Lucidity is targeting Tau pathology in Alzheimer’s disease (NCT03446001). TauRx will now move to determine safety and efficacy of Hydromethylthionine mesylate (HMTM) and the topline results will be announced in May.

US-owned/UK-based Oxitec has announced results from 1st US trial of genetically modified mosquitoes. Oxitec released 5 million engineered Aedes aegypti mosquitoes over the course of 7 months in what constituted the first open-air test with modified mosquitoes in the US. The aim of the study was to reduce the number of wild and potentially virus-carrying mosquitoes. The researchers can identify whether the mosquitoes carry the lethal gene as these fluoresce under a particular wavelength.

Evonetix has appointed Paul Beastall to Chair of the Board. Beastall, Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, was Strategic Director at Cambridge Consultants and has over 20 years of experience in product development. Evonetix aims to bring semiconductor technology to DNA synthesis.

Oxford Science Enterprise has appointed Richard Laxer as Non-Executive Director. Laxer, ex-Chairman and CEO of GE Capital, served the company for almost 34 years and will bring his experience leading global team and bringing forward a broad range or multi-billion dollar business in the financial services industry.

Edinburgh- based biotech Biocaptiva has appointed Alison Williamson as Board Director and Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Williamson started her career at KPMG and has held a number or senior roles in RMS and Deloitte. She was CFO at DYSIS Medical Ltd, a global medical device business developing cancer screening technologies. Biocaptiva aims to transform liquid biopsy testing for cancer management with their proprietary cell-free DNA capture device (BioCaptis).

Galien Foundation to host first-ever Prix Galien UK Forum for Life Sciences on Thursday, 12 May at the Science Museum, London.

Autolus has been granted FDA’s Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation for its B-Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia (B-ALL) CD19-directed CAR-T cell therapy (Obe-cel). RMAT designation is granted to drug candidates with potential to address significant unmet needs in patients with life-threatening conditions. It facilitates the drug development and expedites the review process. Obe-cell has already been granted Priority Medicines (PRIME) designation by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), and Innovative Licensing and Access Pathway (ILAP) by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), United Kingdom, both equivalent to RMAT.

After 20 years and $200 billion, AbbVie’s Humira patent is about to expire and so is the most lucrative pharmaceutical monopoly in history. In 2019, Humira sales accounted for over half of AbbVie’s revenue. The company has been trying to lessen its reliance on this drug but competition will be significant as 9 Humira biosimilars are expected to be launched during 2023. For context, the most lucrative drug to go generic was Pfizer’s Lipitor with sales reaching about $13 billion per year. Just last year, Humira reached $20.7 billion. Humira's extended main patent protection in 2016 allowed AbbVie to launch Skyrizi and Rinvoq, two immunotherapeutics that would be making up the revenue loses.

The story of the Innovative Genomics Institute Clinical Laboratory at UC Berkeley.

Dr Russ Tucker, PhD in biomedical engineering at Oxford University and co-founder of Ivy Farm, explains in this TEDxOxford how to produce cultivated meat.

An interesting (but technical) read on blood-brain barrier-penetrating single CRISPR-CAS9 nanocapsules for glioblastoma gene therapy.

Rethinking the science of science funding, with Sam Arbesman, Lux Capital’s scientist-in-residence.