Constructive Bio, a Cambridge, UK-based biotechnology company, raised $15m in seed funding.
The round was led by Ahren alongside Amadeus Capital Partners, General Inception and OMX Ventures.
The funding will be used to build out the technology platforms for commercial application, including assembling synthetic genomes and synthesis of non-natural polymers using bacterial strains.
The company also signed an exclusive license from the Medical Research Council to IP developed by Professor Jason Chin (CSO)’s Laboratory at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.
The Chin Lab has pioneered the development and application of methods for reprogramming the genetic code of living organisms, rewriting the near-universal genetic code of natural life to create organisms that use new genetic codes. The new organisms deliver remarkable properties: they are resistant to a wide variety of viruses, they can be programmed to make new unnatural, or synthetic, polymers, and even perform entirely new functions.
The company, which is headquartered in Cambridge, UK, is based upon two core proprietary platform technologies:
- Large scale DNA assembly – to construct large chunks of DNA at unprecedented scale e.g., whole bacterial genomes can be built from scratch; and
- Genome reprogramming – to systematically recode whole genomes to engineer unnatural products for commercial applications.
Together, the MRC technologies will be used by Constructive Bio to synthesise polymers with non-natural amino acids for commercial applications across a range of industries including novel therapeutics and antibiotics, enhanced agriculture, manufacturing and materials. In addition, the new organisms’ phage resistance can be used to increase bio-manufacturing yields.
The company is led by recently appointed Chief Executive Officer and Board member Dr Ola Wlodek, former Chief Operating Officer at Reflection Therapeutics.
FinSMEs
15/08/2022