Cambridge antibody company raises £4.5M in first round

Funding

Antibody start-up Crescendo Biologics Ltd has raised £4.5 million in a first round funding to advance the development of a new platform technology for producing antibody drugs.

The Cambridge-based company has technology for generating heavy chain fragments of antibodies, which are smallest functional binding units of antibodies. They have the advantage over their full-scale brethren of being amenable to oral or inhaled administration, are easier and cheaper to manufacture, and have the potential to bind to targets that are inaccessible to conventional antibodies.

Other companies, such as the Belgian company Ablynx NV, are developing therapeutics based on antibody fragments, but Crescendo says it will be the first to develop an in vivo platform for doing so.

The £4.5 million start-up money comes from Sofinova Partners, with local UK investors Aitua, Avlar Bioventures, and the Rainbow Seed Fund also taking part. Mike Romanos, chief scientific officer, said this will enable Cambridge-based Crescendo to fully develop the platform over the next 2–3 years, and to generate some lead candidates.

The company’s technology, developed at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, involves genetically engineering mice so that they produce antibodies that are not only fully human, but also only carry heavy chains.

This ability of the transgenic mouse platform to rapidly and predictably generate soluble human heavy chain fragments with no need for humanisation will be combined with the second arm of Crescendo’s technology, an in vitro ribosome display system, for fast optimisation.

“We have the components to build the platform. We now need to generate the transgenics,” Romanos said. As soon as the first heavy chain fragments are produced, the company will couple up the ribosome display and test the resulting entities against a set of targets.

“This will form the starting point for therapeutics,” said Romanos. “The plan is to develop a therapeutic pipeline with further venture capital funding, but we are also open to early partnering.”