Life sciences companies can now apply for a share of £20 million to expand manufacturing of medicines, diagnostics and med tech in the UK.

The Medicines and Diagnostics Manufacturing Transformation Fund, unveiled by the prime minister last November, is designed to give UK companies a competitive advantage and boost the country’s ability to respond to future pandemics.
It is hoped the fund will grow and strengthen the UK’s capabilities as well as encourage companies to deploy new technologies, build new factories and harness new advances, including bioprocessing, data and using greener manufacturing processes.

With two-thirds of life sciences manufacturing jobs already outside London and the South East, the new fund will also open up economic and investment opportunities for manufacturers across the whole of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the government noted.

“This £20 million investment will harness the best in UK manufacturing and fund cutting-edge medical technologies to protect the British public in 2021 and beyond,” said business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng. “This will not only boost the UK’s already strong vaccine and medicine portfolio but support top quality, local jobs across the country and put the UK in a formidable position to continue responding to the most pressing global challenges of our time.”

Cambridge, UK-based Alchemab Therapeutics has raised £60m ($82m) in a Series A funding round, in a bid to advance its target-agnostic drug discovery platform.

The funding will be used to advance the company’s novel platform, which interrogates the entire antibody repertoires of individuals from well-defined groups to identify unexpected resistance to disease despite genetic disposition or other risk factors increasing the likelihood of a poor prognosis.

Using these insights, Alchemab is aiming to select naturally protective antibodies with therapeutic potential, with an initial focus on the development of novel therapeutics for hard-to-treat neurodegenerative diseases and cancers.

Cancer Research UK spin-out Achilles Therapeutics has closed its US Initial Public Offering (IPO) with gross proceeds of $175.5 million.

Achilles is a clinical-stage immuno-oncology biopharma developing precision T-cell therapies to treat multiple types of solid tumours.

Its approach centres on targeting clonal tumour neoantigens, mutations formed early in the development of a cancer that give rise to antigens expressed on every single cancer cell that are absent from healthy tissue, thus presenting a new target for treatment with the potential to cut the risk of new mutations and resistance.

The company has two ongoing Phase I/IIa trials, including a study of a clonal neoantigen T-cell therapy in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer, which dosed its first patient in June last year.