· Grants totalling in excess of £2.2M awarded from two industry leading innovation funds
· The new grants will support the development of Laverock’s single-cell and AI powered gene-control platform, alongside pipeline expansion into additional therapeutic areas.
Laverock Therapeutics (‘Laverock’), a biotechnology company developing disease-responsive advanced therapies through its unique, programmable gene control technology, today announced it has been awarded two new grants totalling in excess of £2.2M to support the next generation of its gene-control platform development and expansion into additional non-oncology therapeutic areas.
The new grants provide further validation for Laverock’s differentiated technology and therapeutics pipeline. This expands on previous awards where the Company raised £1.8M in non-dilutive funding from UK Research and Innovation as part of Investor Partnership, Biomedical Catalyst and SMART business awards.
To date, Laverock’s gene-control platform has been demonstrated across a wide range of therapeutic applications and cell types, including developing programmed T-cells and macrophages for solid tumour indications, as well as hypoimmunogenic pancreatic islet cells for Type-1 diabetes.
The first grant-funded project will focus on scaling the Company’s platform within a T-cell product context, utilising solid tumour-based patient datasets, and foundational data around both intracellular signalling and antigen expression. Leveraging single cell and AI-powered approaches Laverock will be able to rapidly identify the preferred combination of product features to unlock efficacy and safety in solid tumour cancer indications, tailored to tumour type, and using patient derived models for rapid prototyping and evaluation.
The second grant will enable the expansion of Laverock’s macrophage-based programmes into non-oncology indications, building upon the platform’s ability to program myeloid cell phenotypes and precisely control the expression of therapeutically relevant payloads. This work will be part of a consortium effort pulling in leading experts in the disease indication of interest and across the product development workflow to enable rapid translation to the clinic.
David Venables, Laverock Therapeutics CEO, said: “Success in these two highly competitive grant competitions provides further validation of our approach and will enable us to expand our efforts across platform and product development. As we push towards the clinic for our lead programme this additional funding will help unlock the true breadth of what our technology can achieve. We can’t wait to get started!“
