Puridify wins £100,000 in SROne and OBR competition

SROne, the venture capital arm of GlaxoSmithKline, and Oxbridge Biotech Roundtable (OBR) have awarded £100,000 and a laboratory support package to Puridify.

The London-based spinout from the Department of Biochemical Engineering of University College London (UCL) received the money after winning SROne’s and OBR’s first life-sciences business plan competition, OneStart.

The competition was created to inspire entrepreneurship in Europe's young scientific community. Launched in January, it brought teams of scientists, business school students and industry professionals under the age of 35 together to turn the science they developed inside academia into commercially viable businesses.

Puridify's product, known as FibroSelect, will accelerate the production of biological therapies. These state-of-the-art, targeted treatments use antibodies to fight a range of diseases, including cancer and autoimmune disease. Fibroselect uses a unique chromatography technology in the purification of the treatments, which allows bacteria to be filtered out in a fraction of the time, and at a significantly lower cost.

Ian Tomlinson, Head of Worldwide Business Development at GSK, and one of the judges, said Puridify’s technology ‘has the potential to replace many of the existing approaches in the multi-billion dollar market of biological therapy production’.

Puridify will use the £100,000 prize money to fund the development of FibroSelect from research to industrial scale. The team will have access to lab space at the Stevenage BioScience Catalyst, where it will benefit from the open innovation model, gaining access to the expertise, networks and scientific facilities traditionally associated with multinational pharmaceutical companies.

Puridify’s technology has the potential to replace many of the existing approaches in the multi-billion dollar market of biological therapy production

The judges also gave a special commendation and £10,000 to Lipopep, a placenta-targeting drug delivery technology developed at the University of Manchester. This technology allows existing drugs to be delivered directly to the placenta and would be the first treatment option available for pregnancy complications, which affect around 10% of all pregnancies.

The OneStart competition attracted entries from over 300 individuals across 100 teams. The top 35 teams were invited to attend a Biotech Bootcamp day in March along with more than 50 industry professionals, where they received skill seminars, tailored one-on-one specialist consulting sessions and practice in pitching their businesses to panels. Each team was then assigned an industry mentor who helped them write their business plans over the following month before submitting it to the judging panel and presenting to an assessor.

Having spent another month working on their plan, the teams presented their plans to the judging panel, which included Tomlinson, plus Jens Eckstein, President of SROne; Daniel Perez, President and Founder of OBR; Kate Bingham, Managing Partner at SVLS; Andrew Sandham, CEO of Kymab; and Maria Bobadilla, Academic Innovation Partnering at Roche.