NanoSyrinx

NanoSyrinx is an award-winning, discovery stage synthetic biology company, creating a next-generation platform technology for the targeted intracellular delivery of biological medicines. Most drugs do not traverse the body well and they often end up in places where they are not intended to act, limiting their effectiveness and leading to unwanted side-effects. This is an even greater problem for biologic drugs, such as antibodies and peptides; and consequently new delivery technologies are sorely needed.

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    We are on a mission to fundamentally revolutionise how medicines are administered – on a nanoscopic scale.

    Building on over a decade of fundamental research, our scientists are harnessing the unique properties of Nature’s own elegant solution to the intracellular bioavailability problem.

    2017

    Start Date

    Coventry

    Location

    11

    Employees

    £450k

    Grants

    £6.6M

    Equity

    The Journey

    “NanoSyrinx’s founding team completed Innovate UK ICURe in 2017. Following conversations with >100 stakeholders from the biotech, pharmaceutical and VC investment community, it was clear that there was a significant market opportunity for new technologies, which could deliver biological drugs selectively to the interior of cells. It was also clear that further technical validation and IP protection was needed, before the opportunity was “investable”. Using the market feedback from ICURe, the team were able to secure >£300k of proof of concept funding from the BBSRC and the University of Warwick, to generate more data and secure the IP. Additional support was provided by Warwick Innovations to enable the team to attend industry and investor partnering events.
    In 2020, the company secured pre-seed investment of £400k led by M Ventures, matched by a £200k grant from Innovate UK.

    Following the successful completion of initial milestones, the company completed an oversubscribed Seed round, totaling just over £6.2m in 2021, co-led by Octopus Ventures and M Venture.

    As of 2023, the company employs 14 full time staff and have recently been recognised as an AbbVie Golden Ticket winner (2022) and PwC Life Sciences Future50 company (2023).”

    Dr James Lapworth, Chief Business Officer

    2017

    Completed ICURe

    Told to go back to the lab because technical validation was not strong enough and IP protection was not in place

    2018

    Secured Warwick POC funding £69k, secured BBRSC Pathfinder award £14k

    2019

    Secured BBSRC Follow-on Fund grant £250k, IP filed

    2020

    Spin out company formed

    Secured initial investment £400k led by M Ventures, secured £200k Innovate UK Grant with matched investment from the UK Innovation & Science Seed Dund (UKI2S). Worked through pandemic to top-up IP

    2021

    Secured Seed Investment £6.2m co-led by Octopus Ventures and M Ventures

    2022

    Won the UK AbbVie Golden Ticket award

    What companies had to say about the Innovate UK ICURe programme?

    Future Goals

    Our long term vision is to develop new medicines which leverage the unique capabilities of our nanosyringe platform technology.
    In the era of proteomics and genomics, a huge number of new drug targets are being identified, which have the potential to improve the lives of millions of people, with currently unmet medical needs.
    The problem is that the majority of these targets are inside the cell and they cannot be accessed using currently available delivery approaches.