Latest UK Life Sciences News

Arecor Therapeutics has raised approximately £5.0 million through a placing of 7,352,941 new shares at 68 pence each with institutional and other professional investors. The proceeds extend its cash runway to December 2027 and fund its insulin development programme while it continues advanced-stage negotiations with multiple insulin pump companies.

Nanomerics has closed its Series A round, led by an unnamed German strategic investor with participation from the Silverstein Dream Foundation. The amount was not disclosed. The funding will advance its MET and METfect delivery platforms and its eye-drop pipeline, including clinical-stage OC134 for allergic conjunctivitis and dry eye disease.

Scancell has entered a loan agreement with BlackRock-managed funds for up to $25 million to support the Phase 3 trial of its melanoma immunotherapy iSCIB1+. The facility is available in four tranches, with an initial $7 million subject to shareholder approval at an EGM expected in October 2026, alongside its planned merger with Neuphoria Therapeutics.

Basecamp Research has raised a $140M Series C led by S32, with participation from NVIDIA, Menlo Ventures' Anthology Fund, the NATO Innovation Fund and The Rockefeller Foundation, among others. The funding will train a new generation of its EDEN biological foundation models and advance a pipeline of AI-designed therapeutics towards the clinic, starting with in vivo cell therapy. S32 General Partner Andy Conrad joins the board, and former Biogen executive Richard Pearce has been appointed Chief Business Officer.

Scarlet Therapeutics has entered into an agreement with DARPA worth up to $14 million to develop adaptive smart red blood cells (SRBCs), engineered to sense physiological changes and adjust their activity in response. Scarlet will lead a multidisciplinary consortium including the University of Bristol, Northwestern University and Unicorn Biotechnologies, building on its existing platform for engineering red blood cells to carry therapeutic proteins.

Big Picture Bio has emerged from stealth with €2.55 million (£2.2 million) in combined funding to develop AI-designed combination therapies for cancer. The round comprises a €1.75 million pre-seed co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures, alongside €815k in non-dilutive support from Innovate UK's Investor Partnerships Programme. Founded by former Deep Science Ventures leaders Dr Kerstin Papenfuss and Dr Mark Hammond, the company has built a generative "world model" simulating tumour, immune cell and tissue interactions to predict which drug combinations and sequences are most likely to overcome cancer resistance, and will use the funding to move its first designed combinations from computational models into the lab.

Lifebit has been awarded a three-year contract by the University of Cambridge to provide the Trusted Research Environment for the NIHR BioResource. The platform will be deployed within the BioResource's own AWS tenancy, giving researchers access to consented data from more than 350,000 volunteers without the data being moved.

CrystecPharma has secured a loan from NPIF II – Mercia Debt Finance, part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II, to scale its operations ahead of a planned equity investment round. The Bradford-founded pharmaceutical technology company, which uses supercritical fluid processing to engineer drug crystals and particles for inhaled and stabilised medicines, increased revenue by almost 80% in 2025 and expects a further 50% rise this year. The funding will support capacity growth as co-founders Paul Thorning and Qun Shao move from their academic roles at the University of Bradford to focus on the business full-time.

Chemify has received £22 million in grants from Scottish Enterprise and the UK Government to build a second-generation Chemifarm and become what it calls the first "Chemistry Hyperscaler." The grant sits alongside an extension of Chemify's Series B to £51.9 million, taking total funding secured to more than £110 million, and will support a new global headquarters at the University of Glasgow's Health Innovation Hub in Govan. The expansion is expected to grow Chemify's Scottish workforce from 152 to around 450 over three years, creating up to 300 jobs.

Ori Biotech has signed a strategic collaboration with an undisclosed biopharmaceutical company to integrate its IRO® platform into a commercial autologous cell therapy manufacturing process, in a deal valued at up to $120 million in services, milestones, equipment and consumable purchases over 10 years. The partners will work to demonstrate comparability of the IRO process to the partner's existing commercial manufacturing process, aiming to reduce batch-to-batch variability, operator touch time and cost while expanding patient access. IRO has now signed 23 partners since its 2024 launch and reached a milestone in May 2026 with the first patient dosed with a therapy manufactured on the platform and released under GMP.

Magnitude Biosciences has raised £1.3 million to scale VivoScan, its high-throughput in vivo drug discovery platform built on C. elegans whole-organism screening. Northstar Ventures led the round through its North East Spinout Inspire Fund, North East Innovation Fund and EIS Growth Fund, joined by Maven's regional funds and new angel investors, with the raise also unlocking a further £217,000 Innovate UK Investor Partnership grant. The company plans to use the funding to expand commercial work with pharmaceutical clients, invest in automation, and grow its team.

Dimension Biotechnologies has launched out of the University of Bristol with more than £700,000 in pre-seed funding to develop a blood test for microvascular disease. The platform measures changes in the glycocalyx, the sugar-rich lining of blood vessels, to give an early biochemical readout of vascular damage linked to kidney disease, cardiovascular disease and dementia, without imaging or tissue biopsies. The round combines £490,000 from Kidney Research UK, the University of Bristol, angel investors and the KQ Labs Accelerator, plus £215,000 in Innovate UK grant funding.

Transition Bio has received a $750,000 grant from the Little Warrior Foundation to pursue a therapy against EWS-FLI1, the fusion protein that drives Ewing sarcoma. The company will apply its microfluidics and machine learning platform for intrinsically disordered proteins to characterise EWS-FLI1 and design small molecules that disrupt it, targeting what would be the first precision treatment for the disease.

IMU Biosciences has signed a licensing agreement giving Eurofins Transplant Genomics exclusive access to its High Definition Immunology platform for transplant-related clinical development programmes. The deal puts IMU's high-throughput immune profiling into one of the largest post-transplant monitoring networks, targeting suboptimal immunosuppression as a driver of chronic rejection and premature graft loss.

ViaNautis has taken investment from SCI Ventures, a specialist fund backed by clinical centres and research foundations working on paralysis, adding chronic spinal cord injury to its CNS portfolio. The programme applies polyNaut, the company's nanobody-guided polymer nanovesicle platform, to deliver regenerative genetic payloads to cells at and around spinal cord lesions, an indication with no approved regenerative therapies to date.

OutSee has been awarded a £50,000 grant, jointly funded by Innovate UK and Empirical Ventures through the Investor Partnership Growth Catalyst programme, plus matching investment. The funding will support a pilot study to build a prototype agentic AI sub-system for initial triage of drug targets identified by Nomaly, OutSee's predictive genomics platform, aiming to remove a manual validation bottleneck currently handled by its scientific team.

Holiferm has announced a strategic combination with Organica UK, pairing its fermentation-derived biosurfactants with Organica's biodegradable household and cleaning product formulation and manufacturing. Backed by a continued partnership with investor Sadorp, the combined business spans ingredient development through to finished products, with the two companies continuing to operate from adjacent sites in the North West.

Flip Therapeutics has received £500,000 from Medicines Discovery Catapult, funded via Innovate UK, alongside translational drug discovery expertise and access to MDC's advisor network. The investment supports validation of Flip's in vivo T cell reprogramming payloads and their integration with nanoparticle delivery technology, aimed at chronic autoimmune and inflammatory diseases including alopecia areata and psoriasis.

C4X Discovery will receive a $13 million milestone payment from AstraZeneca, triggered by the entry of its licensed oral NRF2 activator programme (AZD4916) into a Phase I clinical trial. Under the 2022 licensing agreement, C4XD is potentially eligible for up to $400 million in preclinical, development and commercial milestones plus tiered royalties on future sales; AZD4916 is being developed for inflammatory and respiratory diseases.

Nascent Therapeutics, a University of East Anglia spinout, has secured £750,000 led by Zinc Venture Capital with Medicines Discovery Catapult co-investing, the latter funded via Innovate UK. The funding will advance Nascent's platform regulating mitochondrial transfer between cells, initially targeting Parkinson's disease, with the company's founding work having earlier been supported by £75,000 from UEA's MRC Impact Accelerator Account and a £50,000 UEA Innovation Development Award.

Nxera Pharma will receive an $8.6 million milestone payment from Centessa Pharmaceuticals, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Eli Lilly, after Centessa reached a late-stage development milestone in its selective orexin receptor 2 agonist portfolio. The payment is triggered under Nxera's research collaboration with Centessa and will be recognised as revenue in the third quarter of the year ending 31 December 2026.

Holland & Barrett has launched FORMI, a new own-brand weight management line, with its first product containing OptiBiotix Health's SlimBiome formulation. The launch builds on a three-year non-exclusive trademark licence agreement signed in December 2025 and targets consumers seeking non-drug weight management options, including those who don't tolerate or have completed GLP-1 treatment.

Qkine has secured £1.6 million in follow-on investment from CPI Enterprises, EverQuest Capital Partners, Parkwalk Advisors and EMV Capital, building on CPI Enterprises' initial backing in 2022. The funding will support Qkine's growth factors, cytokines and proteins for stem cell and cell therapy manufacturing, with the company planning to strengthen its leadership team, grow its US presence, scale GMP-grade manufacturing and expand R&D.

Renalytix has signed a multi-year agreement with Quest Diagnostics to expand US access to its kidneyintelX.dkd blood test, with availability through Quest's specimen collection and connectivity network targeted for early 2027. Renalytix will continue to run the assay at its New York laboratory and handle billing, while the deal also gives Quest an option to in-license the test after specified commercialisation milestones.