Spin-out companies
A spin-out company can be the best way to assemble a team of dedicated scientists and experts and attract the significant investment needed to develop a technology.
We have all the necessary support and expertise in-house to form new companies and long-term partnerships.
Ten companies have been developed from Crick science, each progressing discoveries from across cell therapy, vaccine, medical technology and small molecule therapeutics. They employ over 300 people and have raised more than £350m in follow-on investment.
Our oncology companies have established UK research and development (R&D) teams, running clinical trials in the UK, and enabling the exchange of knowledge and secondments between academia and industry.
Get in touch with the Crick's Innovation and Business team to find out more about how you can work with us.
Achilles Therapeutics was formed in 2016 with £13.2 million backing from life science investment company Syncona LLP, the Cancer Research Technology Pioneer Fund and the UCL Technology Fund.
The company is based on research by scientists at the Crick and UCL. Charlie Swanton and colleagues discovered unique markers that are present on the surface of all cancer cells in an individual patient's tumour, but not on healthy cells. These markers can act as flags to the immune system. Achilles Therapeutics is developing cancer therapies that target these markers with the aim of destroying tumours without harming healthy tissues.
The aim is to develop a truly personalised approach to cancer therapy by targeting cell surface markers that are specific to each patient and present on all cancer cells rather than just a subset of cells.
Achilles TherapeuticsAdendra Therapeutics Ltd was launched in December 2021 with an investment of £40 million from life sciences investment company Apple Tree Partners. The spin-out will discover and develop treatments for solid cancers and autoimmune diseases using research from Caetano Reis e Sousa’s lab at the Crick.
Dendritic cells play a key role in alerting the immune system to the presence of threats, such as cancer or disease-causing organisms. Caetano’s lab studies the protein receptors around and inside the cell which detect these potential health risks and deliver the necessary signals to initiate an immune response.
Immunotherapies developed by Adendra will focus on modulating dendritic and other related cells in order to fine-tune their immunological control of cancer or curtail T cell-driven autoimmune disorders.
Artios was established at the Babraham Research Campus in 2016, and in August 2018, the company raised £65 million. It was founded from in-licensing of two research programs from Cancer Research UK, one of which was discovered and developed in Simon Boulton’s lab at the London Research Institute, which is now part of the Crick.
Artios is developing new treatments that target DNA repair pathway vulnerabilities to selectively kill cancer cells either as mono-therapies or in combination with existing treatments. The company’s leading potential therapies will enter clinical trials in 2021.
In December 2020, Artios entered into a Global Strategic Collaboration with Merck KGaA to expedite the development of precision oncology medicines targeting DDR nuclease. As VP of Science Strategy (0.2FTE), Simon assists the executive team to identify and evaluate new pipeline opportunities from the global academic and industrial DDR network. He also chairs the Scientific Advisory Board and is a member of the Executive board.
Artios Pharma LtdGeorge Kassiotis is one of the scientific co-founders of Enara Bio, a Crick spin-out company developing cancer-specific vaccines and other immunotherapies. George’s team worked with the Crick’s Translation team, including Expert in Residence, Houman Ashrafian, to build the company, and the team went on to win the Crick’s Sir David Cooksey Prize in Translation in 2018.
Enara Bio’s approach is based on ‘endogenous retroviruses’ or viral DNA, dormant fragments of DNA left in our genome by viruses that infected our ancestors. When a cell becomes cancerous, it can reactivate these dormant sections of our DNA, sending signals visible to our immune system. Enara Bio hopes to train the immune system to spot these signals and create vaccines that selectively target cancer cells.
Enara BioGammaDelta Therapeutics was co-founded in 2016 by Adrian Hayday and Oliver Nussbaumer of the Crick and King's College London with support from life sciences investors Abingworth and Cancer Research Technology.
The spin-out company received a $100million cash injection from drug firm Takeda Pharmaceuticals in 2017 to further develop its new class of immunotherapies.
The company aims to exploit the unique activities of gamma delta (γδ) T cells that are found in the body's tissues where cancers and inflammatory diseases take hold. The novel T-cell approach could lead to new immunotherapies for a broad range of cancers and auto-inflammatory diseases. GammaDelta Therapeutics has four cell therapy products in pre-clinical development for blood and solid tumours.
Mihaly Kollo, a researcher in the Sensory Circuits and Neurotechnology Lab at the Crick, is part of a team developing an AI-powered map of research literature to help scientists navigate the ever-increasing number of scientific papers.
With the help of the Crick's translation team and an ‘idea to innovation’ grant funded by the MRC, the company was able to work with a specialist data scientist to create a unique machine learning system that ‘reads’ papers and extracts the experimental methods and results. The program can then compare similar studies, as well as show gaps in previous research where more work could be done. It has the potential to enable biomedical researchers in industry and academia to regain access to the exponentially growing body of scientific knowledge.
Metacognis was one of the first companies to take part in KQ Labs, the Crick’s start-up accelerator. The company has since secured its first partnership to validate the platform and has been recently granted a Horizon2020 FTI grant to develop its product.
Spotlight on Mihaly KolloMyricx Pharma, a drug discovery company spun-out from Imperial College London and the Crick launched in 2020 with an initial £4.5 million seed financing.
The company is founded on 15 years of world-leading research on N-myristoyltransferase (NMT) and breakthrough discoveries related to its inhibition in cancer.
Over the past five years, a team of researchers, led by Ed Tate, a chemist from Imperial College London with a satellite group at the Crick, and Dinis Calado, who leads the Crick’s Immunity and Cancer Laboratory, has been studying pathways that support B-cell lymphoma growth, and finding new ways to block them.
Together with support from the platforms and facilities at the Crick, the team found that blocking NMT can kill cancerous cells driven by the gene MYC. MYC plays a role in a number of hard-to-treat cancers and directly targeting the gene has been a challenge - until now, it was thought to be ‘undruggable’.
The company anticipates advancing its compounds to preclinical development in the near future and will build out its research and development (R&D) team with medicinal chemistry and clinical development experience.
Myricx PharmaAdaptate Biotherapeutics was spun out from GammaDelta Therapeutics. The company builds on GammaDelta’s knowledge to modulate γδ T-cell activity using therapeutic antibodies, with the potential to trigger an immune response against cancer.
The two companies will continue sharing their insights into γδ T-cell biology as they work towards developing different therapeutic modalities.
Adaptate BiotherapeuticsParadromics was established in 2015 and is developing next generation brain-computer interface technology for effective therapies for brain-related disorders. It harnesses discoveries from Andreas Schaefer’s laboratory of an accurate and scalable method to record and stimulate brain activity across large areas, including on the surface and in deeper regions simultaneously.
The company has received $18.3 Million from a DARPA Grant and venture capital (VC) investments. Crick group leader, Andreas Schaefer, is a co-founder and on the Scientific Advisory Board.
ParadromicsmPixl was co-founded in 2020 by Ana Da Silva Gomes, a senior scientist in Dominique Bonnet’s group.
mPixl emerged after the lab which was awarded i2i funding for developing a concept and a follow up clinical study in collaboration with Barts Health NHS Trust. Following participation in the MedTechSuperConnector an Imperial-led medical entrepreneurship programme of which the Crick is a partner, and KQ Labs, the five-month accelerator programme delivered by the Crick that supports start-ups transforming healthcare through data-driven solutions, Ana co-founded mPixl in 2020 with Stefan Videv, Director of Engineering at LiFi R&D Centre. The company aims to develop non-invasive image-based AI algorithms to more accurately detect and monitor in real time the progression, response to therapy, and relapse of blood cancers, without the need for painful and traumatic bone marrow biopsies.
mPixl
