The two partners will work together to identify areas ripe for innovation, hire a Founding Analyst to evaluate potential approaches for scientific and commercial viability, build teams around the optimal approaches, and create one or more high-impact ventures.
As well as improving patient outcomes, the partnership hopes to spur innovation in the sector and open up job opportunities.
The CGT Catapult was established as an independent center of excellence to advance the UK cell and gene therapy industry, bridging the gap between scientific research and full-scale commercialization. Deep Science Ventures, meanwhile, uses a unique venture creation process to create, spin-out and invest into science companies: earmarking high-impact ventures across pharmaceuticals, energy, agriculture and computation.
“Recent advances in cell and gene therapies promise potential cures to some of mankind's most devastating diseases,” the partners said as they announced their collaboration.
“However, major hurdles still need to be overcome, including ensuring target specificity and effective manufacturing at scale.
“This collaboration will leverage Deep Science Ventures’ novel outcome-focused approach to venture creation, which combines available scientific knowledge and founder-type scientists into high-impact ventures. CGT Catapult will provide its cell and gene therapy-specific technical, non-clinical and regulatory expertise to apply Deep Science Ventures’ approach to the ATMP sector.”
Deep Science Ventures has so far built and invested in nine brand new companies in the curative therapeutics space, including three oncology ventures last year with Cancer Research UK. The nine companies are ConcR, ImmTune, Enedra, Neobe and Stratosvir (oncology); Reflection Therapeutics (neurodegeneration) and CC Bio and Ancilia (microbiome and AMR).
Deep Science Ventures' approach
Only 10% of drugs succeed at Phase 3 clinical trials. DSV says the current rate of therapeutic failure is unsustainable and unnecessary: with various reasons ranging from poor models to lack of specificity.
It says the emergency of personalized and precision therapeutics creates the opportunity to address entrenched and repeated failures across the process of bringing a new product to market.
This includes leveraging computation to unpick complex dynamic systems, move the computation into the therapeutic itself, address root causes directly and drive the creation of better models and markers.
“At DSV we aim to get back to first principles and understand the root cause and bottlenecks that have led to past failures. Not just failures in the science but perhaps even more importantly, to discover the gaps and biases in the innovation pipeline.
“Our approach is to forge a less linear R&D process identifying analytical and model approaches that fully capture complexity and patient specificity; and force a truly multi-stakeholder creation process with academics, venture capital, charities and industry engaged in the design process from day one.”
CGT Catapult will be speaking in our upcoming webinar: 'Cell and gene therapies: How can their promise be realized?'. Register for free here.
