The United Kingdom remains the leader of European biotech efforts, securing £563 million in venture capital and public financing per third quarter reports — a 49 percent increase from the previous quarter. Much of this investor interest can be credited to work turned out by ‘the golden triangle,’ a rich cluster of life science resources in Oxford, Cambridge and London.
This network of research centers, healthcare providers, medical charities and world-leading universities spans 11.6 million square feet in laboratory space, generating about £8.4 billion per annum. It’s also home to about half of all UK-based research centers and employees.
With a number of sprouting startups and academic spinouts, here are some of the top biotech firms hailing from the UK’s third-largest region of employment, London.
Top Biotech Companies in London
- Pulmocide
- Quell Therapeutics
- P.Happi
- Touchlight
- AviadoBio
Top Biotech Companies in London
Founded in 1988, Regeneron aims to invent, develop and commercialize medicines for people with serious diseases while establishing new ways of thinking about science, manufacturing and commercialization. The company has seven offices worldwide.
Standard BioTools claims to deliver the leading proteomic and multi-omic solutions that enable researchers to discover biological insights different than those accessible by other technologies. The company is headquartered in the United States, with additional offices in Canada, England and Singapore.
P.Happi is a biotech startup developing a bioactive serum that improves uro-vaginal health by restoring balance to a woman’s microbiome. Led by an all-female team of scientists, P. Happi is recruiting 30 UK-based women for a six-month study to be conducted in 2024, with plans for a public launch to follow.
Kuano’s discovery platform aims to combine target quantum mapping and artificial intelligence-led chemistry to enable faster development of better drug candidates. In addition to its in-house discovery programs, the company is interested in drug discovery collaborations with pharmaceutical and biotech companies seeking new approaches to inhibitors for validated or intractable enzyme targets.
Founded in 2013, BenevolentAI combines artificial intelligence and machine learning with science to decipher disease biology, generate insights and discover medicines. Its computational research and development platform spans every step of the drug discovery process, powering an in-house pipeline of more than 25 drug programs.
Lifebit claims to be pushing the “frontiers of health and knowledge” by democratizing access to omics data. Using Lifebit CloudOS, the world’s first federated genomics platform for unified and secure research over distributed big data, researchers of all backgrounds can quickly run complex analyses and generate insights.
Pulmocide is a biopharmaceutical company developing inhaled medicines for respiratory fungal and viral infections. Founded in 2007, the company’s flagship product, Opelconazole, is an FDA-approved drug in its third phase of a clinical trial and specifically designed to treat pulmonary aspergillosis. In 2022 Pulmocide raised $52 million in funding, bringing the total of its Series C support to $147.5 million.
The Francis Crick Institute, located in London, is a biomedical research institute dedicated to advancing, promoting and sharing understanding of human health and disease. Since 2011, the institute has grown into a team of nearly 2,000 employees.
INEOS is a global manufacturer of raw materials and a producer of energy used in everyday life. According to the company, its plans and actions revolve around implementing carbon emission reduction, making safe and sustainable products and investing in energy transition, while also creating jobs and improving living standards worldwide.
Quell Therapeutics is a biotech startup that’s engineering regulatory T cells, or Tregs, for targeted cell therapies. The Tregs are then used to suppress unwanted activity in a patient’s immune system, often linked to autoimmune or inflammatory diseases. In 2023, the startup entered a clinical trial designed to prevent rejection of liver transplants, as well as a $2 billion licensing deal with AstraZeneca to tackle type-1 diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease.
Sania Therapeutics is a biotech company and a developer of therapeutics that aims to transform the lives of people with diseases of dysfunctional neural circuits. Based in London, the company has a team of under 20 employees.
Phastar is a biometrics contract research organization that offers statistical consulting, clinical trial reporting, data management and data science services. It provides consultants while managing and delivering in-house projects and preferred partnerships. Headquartered in London, the company has 15 offices worldwide.
Isomorphic Labs is a commercial venture that aims to reimagine the digital drug discovery process from the ground up using artificial intelligence to model and understand the fundamental mechanisms of life. Established in 2021, the company is headquartered in London.
LabGenius claims to be the first biopharmaceutical company to develop next-generation protein therapeutics. Its machine learning-driven evolution engine, EVA, integrates several technologies from the fields of machine learning, synthetic biology and robotics.
FabricNano’s mission is to transform industrial chemical processes using cell-free biomanufacturing via its scalable biocatalyst platform. Its clients range from startups to international chemical companies, like Sumitomo Chemical Company, all looking to enable profitable production of sustainable and bio-based chemicals.
Touchlight is a biotech company that created a way to produce synthetic DNA using enzymes. Instead of traditional methods, Touchlight has developed a faster, scalable approach that can encode long, complex and unstable sequences without bacterial sequences. The company received its first FDA clearance in 2023 for clinical adoption, approving the use of its enzymatic DNA as in vitro transcription templates to create mRNA for a cell therapy product.
Computational biology company Pear Bio uses organ-on-a-chip and computer vision technology to recreate and compute the human tumor microenvironment and its effects on cancer progression. Additionally, the company says it’s building an atlas of cancer progression to help researchers test experimental drugs and clinicians evaluate potential treatment options for each patient.
Founded in 2018, Peptone is a pre-clinical translational biophysics company focused on the discovery of therapeutics against intrinsically disordered targets. Headquartered in London, the company has an additional office in Ticino, Switzerland.
AviadoBio is a biotech startup creating gene therapies to treat neurodegenerative diseases, with a special focus on precise dosing. Researchers formed AviadoBio to tackle debilitating conditions with the belief that targeted drug delivery is a “game changer,” as it provides maximal biodistribution to the brain and spinal cord. In 2023, the FDA approved AviadoBio’s drug for fast-tracked clinical trial testing in people with frontotemporal dementia.
Cytiva helps customers discover and commercialize the next generation of therapeutics through its technical expertise and portfolio of tools and technologies that enable the development, manufacture and delivery of medicines to patients. Headquartered in Bengaluru, India, the company has additional offices in England and the United States.
