Based on research conducted at University of Oxford and Netherlands Cancer Institute, Scenic Biotech has raised $7.3m to commercialise technology that tackles diseases on the genetic level.
Oxford University Innovation, the tech transfer office of University of Oxford, today announced its spinout Scenic Biotech, which works on immunotherapy technologies, has secured €6.5m ($7.3m) in series A funding.
The round was co-led by BioGeneration Ventures and Inkef Capital, with the support of Oxford Sciences Innovation, the institution’s university venturing fund.
Scenic Biotech, founded this year and based in Amsterdam, emerged out of collaborative research between University of Oxford and Netherlands Cancer Institute.
The money will go towards the advancement of the Scenic Biotech’s technology, which is expected to offer an “off-switch” that can control specific genes involved in rare genetic conditions or cancer.
Identifying such genes with the required degree of certainty had eluded researchers until recently, making Scenic Biotech one of the first companies exploiting that approach.
Cell-Seq can identify targets that were previously entirely unknown even in well-studied areas – the platform stains cells with an antibody and uses DNA sequencing as read-out to essentially get cell biology, which then serves as the basis for drug discovery.
Thijn Brummelkamp, professor at the Netherlands Cancer Institute and co-founder of Scenic Biotech, told GenomeWeb last week that Cell-Seq is able to understand how the genetic regulatory network changes if one player is removed.
He said: “Are there regulators coming in? Are there others falling out? That is the kind of game we can play, and by doing that we can decipher how genes work together, so called genetic interactions such as genetic suppression mechanisms, for example – what kind of mechanisms step in to cause a phenotype when you alter a gene?”
Brummelkamp, in the press release announcing the series A round, added: “For the first time, we can now systematically identify genes that suppress processes that go awry in disease. These genes can serve as starting points for drug development and discovery to rebalance a variety of diseases.
“Our first in-house lead program that resulted from the Cell-Seq technology is in the immuno-oncology space and we will add additional programs in other indications, in particular in rare genetic diseases, in the next two years.”
Sebastian Nijman, associate professor of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at University of Oxford and co-founder of Scenic Biotech, said: “With this financing from a strong Anglo-Dutch venture capital syndicate, we will build the company to discover and develop a completely new class of therapeutic targets.
“Just as gene mutations can cause disease, we now know they can also protect us from disease. However, this insight has not yet been used for target discovery as the identification of such disease suppressing genes has been essentially impossible. Our new technology can now unlock this ‘dark matter’ of our genome.”
