Female-founded Cytochroma secures £1m in grant funding and investment round
by Startacus Admin
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Cytochroma secures investment to scale up team and facilities and to commercialise its ethical drug discovery technology.
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It’s a fab end to the year for innovative life sciences company Cytochroma. The female-founded business has secured nearly £1m following a successful investment round led by Angel Academe alongside Investing Women Angels (IWA) and Cambridge Capital Group. IWA also mentored the company’s founder Kate Cameron, who was a 2021 AccelerateHER Awards winner. In addition, Scottish Enterprise has provided match co-investment funding for the private equity investment round.
Cytochroma has also secured additional investment through multiple grants from Scottish Enterprise and Innovate UK as well as having had success in numerous business competitions which have provided significant funding to date.
The company, which provides ethical, sustainable and accurate alternatives to animal testing in drug discovery and development plans to use the funding to expand its facilities, and grow its sales and technical team. It will also expand its service offering with plans to model a range of tissue and organs, including the development of mini-hearts to predict the safety and effect of new drugs and vaccines.
Based at Roslin, near Edinburgh, a site with a long history of scientific innovation which was the home of Dolly the Sheep, Cytochroma is focused on providing its physiologically relevant models for ethical and accurate acceleration of drug discovery. The company utilises robotics to manufacture and test genetically diverse mini-livers to identify safer, novel medicines faster and more efficiently. Cytochroma has also built an ethically sourced, diverse induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) library which contains backgrounds of ethnic groups that are currently underrepresented in clinical trials. Its rapid microscope-based screening platform is five times faster and 10 times cheaper than standard tests and uses machine learning to become smarter over time.
Speaking on the investment news, Dr Kate Cameron, founder and CEO of Cytochroma, said: “This combination of grant-funding and private equity is a huge boost which will enable Cytochroma to launch its products across the global market and significantly expand its service offering. The investment from groups including Angel Academe, Cambridge Capital and Investing Women Angels, which has supported and mentored me since the early days of Cytochroma, provides a solid platform to drive forward our growth.”
Jackie Waring, CEO of Investing Women Angels added : “Kate is an inspiring female-founder with a great vision on the way forward in modern drug development and discovery. We are absolutely thrilled to be part of this investment round which builds on the close working partnership we’ve developed with Kate over the past four years through AccelerateHER. We now look forward to providing ongoing support to Cytochroma as it enters an exciting phase of its growth journey.”
This is most certainly a startup that’s worth watching - exciting times ahead!
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Published on: 16th December 2021
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