The UCL Technology Fund (‘UCLTF’), which is dedicated to investing in intellectual property commercialisation opportunities arising from UCL’s world-class research base, has announced an investment of up to £1m in biopharmaceutical company, Freeline Therapeutics (‘Freeline’).
Freeline is developing and commercialising gene therapies for bleeding and other life threatening or debilitating disorders. The therapies, which are from one single treatment, have the potential to provide long-term benefits to patients by carrying a therapeutic gene to a target cell in the body.
Freeline was founded in December 2015 by Syncona LLP (‘Syncona’) and UCL Business, the wholly-owned technology transfer company of UCL.
This is UCLTF’s third investment since inception and has been made alongside Syncona’s £25 million Series A financing.
Freeline’s next-generation Adeno-associated virus (AAV) gene therapy platform has been developed by Professor Amit Nathwani, Professor of Haematology at UCL, and it builds on the successful haemophilia B phase I/II trial that he conducted alongside the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.
The results of the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, demonstrated that all ten treated haemophilia B patients showed a safe, sustained expression of blood clotting Factor IX from a single treatment.
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