A university-led biopharmaceutical company has secured almost £200m in funding to translate promising medical research into actual medicines.
The £180m investment has gone into Apollo Therapeutics, an organisation originally set up by six partners:
- University of Cambridge
- Imperial College London
- University College London
- AstraZeneca
- GlaxoSmithKline
- Johnson & Johnson Innovation
June 2021 saw the partnership become an independent pharmaceutical company after a £115m raise but all the founding members still remain, with King’s College London and the Institute of Cancer Research also both recently joining.
The funding will be used to license or acquire additional clinical stage programmes.
“This is a fantastic achievement, from a great team and great investors capitalising on a unique effective drug discovery and development model,” said Dr Iain Thomas, the head of life sciences at Cambridge Enterprise, which is the arm of Cambridge University responsible for translating research into economic and social impact.
Apollo has a scalable research and development platform for the discovery of new medicines; it selects programmes on the quality of the science and the potential to benefit the standard of patient care.
Dr Thomas added: “We are so proud to have been founders with great colleagues at Imperial College and UCL with our pharma partners AstraZeneca, GSK and Johnson and Johnson to deliver patient benefit from ground-breaking academic science.”
Image credit: iStock
