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
5 Top Biotech Companies in London
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
