London-based soft prosthetics company, Koalaa, is celebrating after securing investment from British Design Fund (BDF), to help bring its innovative prosthetics to children and adults across the UK and beyond.

Cambridge based biotechnology company, Phico Therapeutics, has announced it has received £7 million in funding from a consortium of investors.  BGF, the UK and Ireland’s most active growth capital investor, led the round with a £3 million investment, while a further £4 million was received from existing backers.  Founded in 2000 by Dr Heather Fairhead, Phico is developing a biotechnology platform for a new generation of antibiotics to overcome antibacterial resistance. 

Mogrify Limited, a biopharmaceutical company aiming to transform the development of ex vivo cell therapies and pioneer a new class of in vivo reprogramming therapies, has completed the second closing of its Series A financing of $17 million USD, bringing the total raised to $33 million USD in this round. 

Botanical Holdings, the investment holding company focusing on the legal medicinal cannabis industry, comfirms that its Portuguese subsidiary, CECO Wellness (part of the EuroCan division) will receive grant funding of up to €4.3 million ($5.2 million) from the Portugal 2020 Fund. This fund is a partnership between the Portuguese government and the European Commission.

University of Birmingham spinout ChromaTwist Ltd has secured £300k of seed funding to develop a new class of fluorescent materials for use in bio-sensing and bio-imaging tests for diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

Growth capital investor, BGF has exited its investment in Nottingham-based life sciences incubation business, BioCity.  

BGF backed BioCity in January 2019 with funding facilitating BioCity’s investment into a number of seed-stage life sciences businesses. BGF has also invested alongside BioCity in deals such as its investment into North West-headquartered proteomic-data science and diagnostics company, Kinomica, in November last year.   

o2h Ventures, a UK based fund manager through investment in its SEIS and EIS human health funds has made an investment into Stingray Bio Ltd, a new spin out from the University of Sussex supported by the Sussex Innovation Centre.

Oxitec Ltd, the leading developer of insect-based biological solutions to control pests that transmit disease, destroy crops, and harm livestock, has received US$6.8 million in funding from the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s largest charitable foundations, to fund scale-up programs for Oxitec’s just-add-water Friendly™ Aedes aegypti technology.

A team of top scientists from the University of Bristol have formed a new biotech company that is developing ground-breaking and newly patented potential treatments for Coronavirus.

Bristol-based Halo Therapeutics is backed by Charles Grimsdale (former Eden Ventures), Keith MacDonald and Mark Farmer (of Eden Ventures) and a group of Angels from the Bristol area.  It was founded by the team of leading scientists who made a recent breakthrough discovery, which was published in Science Magazine. They found that exposing the SARS-CoV-2 (Coronavirus) virus to a free fatty acid called linoleic acid locks the virus’s spike protein into a closed, non-infective form stopping it in its tracks.

SomaServe Ltd, a pioneer in nanomedicines for crossing biological barriers has completed a highly successful, oversubscribed Series A funding of £2.1m.

The funding round was jointly led by Origin Capital and Meltwind, and had follow on investment from all existing investors including Abcam and o2H Ventures. The success of this funding round is testament to the progress made with collaborators in evaluating PolyNaut® for penetrating the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and the launch by Abcam of PolyNaut®-Dye products.

Maven Equity Finance, part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund (NPIF) and managed by Maven Capital Partners, has led a £2 million funding round for LCC (Liverpool Chirochem Limited), an international chemical technology business whose products form the building blocks to the research and development of new drugs. The NPIF - Maven Equity Fund invested £1 million, alongside the £1 million from the Government’s Future Fund.

Maxwellia, a business that is poised to transform the UK’s self-care market has secured a £3.2m investment in a funding round led by Praetura Ventures.

Maxwellia, which is based at Alderley Park in Cheshire, aims to give people easier and faster access to the treatments they need by converting prescription-only medicines to versions that can be bought in a pharmacy.