Advanced Potions: The Top 10 Biotechs Brewing at Oxford – Labiotech.eu (blog)

The UK is home to acollection of hotspots known as The Golden Triangle for biotech. This week, we take a look at the top biotechs in one vertex, Oxford.

Ahh, Oxford.The image of Hogwarts for fans of the Harry Potter films and home to one of the worlds best all-around academic institutions, Oxford University. Though it ranksjust abit behind its counterpart at Cambridge, the university gave rise to some of the most promising biotechs in Europe, including two unicorns and a number ofchallengers.

Small wonder that bigger industry players are staking out territory in Oxfords biotech scene! German CRO Evotec recently launched Lab282with Oxford Sciences Innovation to act as a bridge between academia and industry. Then in January, Novo Nordisk spent 135M to start a diabetes research centerat the university.

Most of the biotechs are located south of Oxford at Milton Park check em out below!

It may yet be too early to call Immunocore a success story, but the immuno-oncology company has made a name for itself as a biotech unicorn since it raised $320M (293M) in the largest private round in Europe on record. Though CBO Eva-Lotta Allen told me that all immuno-oncology drugs are still experimental, her companystechnology seems to have the confidence of the likes of Neil Woodford and the Baker Brothers convinced. So what is it?

Immunocore relies on its ImmTAC platform, which strips down TCRs to bi-specific molecules and couples them to an anti-CD3 system to activate a T cell response and eradicatetumor cells. The majority of the pipeline is in Phase I, but Immunocores lead candidate IMCgp100 has made it to the pivotal stage in uveal melanoma and cutaneous melanoma. Beyond immuno-oncology, the company is looking to expand into infectious and autoimmune diseases.

Oxitecs founder and CEO Hadyn Parry waded into the thorny issue of GMOs and engineered sterility to stem epidemics of mosquito-borne diseases like Zika, as well as malaria and dengue. As he explained at Refresh earlier this month,Were not using toxic chemicals to fight these diseases but were using themosquitoto fight itself.

The company has since been able to reduce mosquito populations of the Aedes aegypti species by an incredible80-90% by releasing Oxitecs so-calledFriendly Aedes mosquito in field trials in Brazil, the Cayman Islands, the US or India.The results from this technology sealed Oxitecs exitto become part of Intrexon for 146M ($160M) in 2015.

After closing last years largest fundraising round of 120M, Oxford Nanopore has entrenched its position as a British biotech unicorn with nearly 500M raised in total since it was founded in 2005. Its MinION pocket sequencer, which was just used to sequence whole human genomes, has the potential to democratize genome sequencing and disrupt the market and you know the company isserious when onegets hit witha lawsuit from Illumina, as Oxford Nanopore did in 2016.

The biotechs device hinges on a nanopore that directly reads a DNA strand in an electrical, single-molecule and label-free process.CEO Gordon Sanghera told methat the companys R9-Series nanopore is able to read more than one billion bases per 48-hour run with up to 97% accuracy.The company has designed the MinION for broader use,targetingtheclinical diagnostics niche with aFlongle attachment; but the device isalsofinding use in academic research.

PsiOxusworks on oncolytic viruses that turn those so-called cold tumors hot by stimulating an immune response, as CEO John Beadleexplained to us. Theplatform, Tumor-Specific Immuno-Gene Therapy (T-Sign), uses a viral vector to deliver anti-cancer therapeutic transgenes to tumoral cells. In particular, NG-348 encodes the gene forMembrane-integrated T-Cell Engagers (MiTEs), T-cell activating ligands located on the cell surface.

This technology wonPsiOxusa 850M deal with BMSlast December, after a whopping 34.7M (25M)Series C propelled by Neil Woodford, GSKs VC arm and Imperial Innovations in 2015.

PsiOxus isnt scientific co-founder Leonard Seymours only company healso co-founded Oxford Genetics.As CEO & co-founder Ryan Cawood told me, the companywas born when the teamfound thattesting gene therapy plasmidswasincreasingly tough because we justcouldnt make them. Typically, theyre built from an amalgam of sources with no standardization.

So, Oxford Genetics set out to improve DNA design with its synbio-based SnapFast platform, and the team believes in its potential to improve cell and gene therapies through this approach to personalised medicine. Backers like Innovate UK, which handed the company a1.61M (1.8M) grant in January, are buying in.

Though still in its infancy, SpyBiotechmade a splashydebut earlier this year with a4M (4.7M)seed round backed by none other than Googles venture capital arm, GV.Itstechnology hinges on the bonds betweenstrep throat bacteria, Streptococcus pyogenes: the founding academics engineered the bacteria,nicknamedSpy, to make the connection without disrupting the antigen or virus-like protein (VLP)folding.

Vaccinesare tailored to a specific disease by tetheringa VLP to an antigen, but the existing method ofgenetic fusionis costly and unreliable.SpyBiotechs method opens the door to a new generation of more robust vaccines spanning a broad range of diseases that the legendary Greg Winter says we so desperately need.

OxStem is developing cell programming therapies that could treat a range of usually age-related conditions, including dementia, heart failure, macular degeneration, diabetes and cancer, based on the research of spin-off sultansKay Davies, Angela Russell and Steve Davies. In May 2016, the company claimed the title of Largest Fundraising for Academic Spin-Out in a 21.4M roundto which Craig Venters Human Longevity fund contributed.

Oxstems strategy uses a new class of small molecules that can modulate or stimulate endogenouscellsto awakendormant cellular processes. These includerepairand stem cell functions. Since the range of applications is so broad, OxStem has had plans to spin out a number of daughter companies,OxStem Cardio, OxStem Neuro, OxStem Ocular andOxStem Oncology, which is most advanced.

Since we first met KarusTherapeuticsin 2015 to talk about their small molecule therapies for cancer and inflammatory disease, the company has entered the immuno-oncology fray. Its now developing a PI3K-p110/ inhibitorto inhibit cancer cell growth and metastasis: KA2237begana Phase I clinical trial last fall in partnership with MD Anderson Cancer Center, and this lead candidate could be a first-in-class small molecule to fight tumor growth and cancer metastasis.

Since it was founded in 2005, Karus has raised nearly 11M, excludingthe yet undisclosed remainder ofits Series B. That might not seem like a lot, but the company has established itself as solid enough to grow its headcount to at least a dozenemployees to inch its programs towards the clinic.

Oxford BioMedicais one of those companies that has been around for ages, having apparently reached a sustainable equilibrium.It was founded in 1995 to developlentiviral vectors for gene and cell therapy applications, anditwent public in 2008; its market cap now clocks in at164M (186M). Most recently, Orchard Therapeutics signed on as a partner to use Oxford BioMedicas vectors in its ex-vivo stem cell gene therapies for rare diseases.

While itsmodus operandiis to out-license its technology, Oxford Biomedica is receiving its fair share of glory. The companys technology is an important component of Novartis stellarCAR-T therapy, CTL-019. The drug from this Swiss pharma wowed ASH attendees last winter with its 82% response rate in a Phase II trial for B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) and may very well winthe race to be first to market in CAR-T.

Sometimes referred to as the sister company to Immunocore, Adaptimmune deserves its own attention as a potential immuno-oncology success story. This biotech uses whole adaptive T cells from patients rather than biological molecules derived from them. Notably, while Immunocore remains private, Adaptimmune went publicin 2015 with an huge IPO of $191M (157M) on NASDAQ, when it was listed as one of the most volatile of the notoriously volatile biotech stocks.

Though its stock is now less than a third of its original value after some procedural hiccups that led to a partial hold, the company has thesupport of Big Pharma player GSK and one of the largest headcounts on theUK biotech scene. With its 312 employees and a respectablemarket cap of427M(488M), even if thats a third of what it once was, Adaptimmune is more than holding its own as one of the top biotechs not just in Oxford but the UK.

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Advanced Potions: The Top 10 Biotechs Brewing at Oxford - Labiotech.eu (blog)