By Jess Jones
UK drug discovery company Labgenius has raised £35m in a series B funding round as it looks to ramp up its cancer treatment product pipeline.
Labgenius, which is based in London’s old industrial biscuit factory in Bermondsey, plans to use the capital to expand the scope of its machine learning-driven discovery platform and progress its pipeline of drugs.
M Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of science and technology company Merck, led the funding round, alongside several existing investors and new investors Octopus Ventures and LG Corp.
Dr. Oliver Hardick of M Ventures, commented: “The Labgenius approach has the potential to address many of the fundamental challenges faced by antibody engineers.
“We are excited to lead this financing alongside our co-investors and partner with Labgenius’ exceptional team as they scale their platform and progress their pipeline towards the clinic.”
Founded in 2012 by James Field, a PhD student at Imperial College London at the time, Labgenius uses technology to create more effective and safer antibodies for cancer treatment.
It does this through a robotic platform that can ‘optimise’ the properties of antibodies in multiple ways at once, such as how well they target cancer cells, their potency and how easy they are to produce.
Field, the chief executive officer of Labgenius, said “Being able to engineer complex multispecific antibodies has immense potential value.
“Over several years, the Labgenius team has pioneered the development of EVA™ – a discovery platform that’s capable of systematically identifying novel high-performing multispecific antibodies with non-intuitive designs.
“I am inspired by the relentless drive that our team has shown in getting us to this important milestone and look forward to working with our investors as we accelerate the development of both our platform and pipeline.”
The investment brings Labgenius’ total funding to date to £58m.
Dr. Edwin Moses, chairman of Labgenius’ board, said: “Closing a round of this size and with such high-quality investors is a testament both to the power and potential of the Labgenius platform and also the quality and dedication of the Labgenius team.
“We look forward to using our unique and powerful platform to develop new medicines to meet high unmet medical needs and in doing so, reward all our stakeholders for their extraordinary support.”
