The o2h human health EIS Fund, is excited to announce a follow-on investment into Cambridge, UK based Somaserve Ltd. Somaserve is well positioned to collaborate with both biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to explore its proprietary PolyNaut® Technology to improve the therapeutic viability of molecules. Somaserve is under-going an evaluation of its technology with one of the largest pharma companies in the world. It has also established a commercial partnership with AiM listed multi-billion GBP Abcam to develop and commercialise its technology through its customer base.
Prior to this, o2h Ventures invested in its seed funding round in July 2019. Investors at that time included Abcam and a small group of angels including some Cambridge Angels. New investors have joined this investment round and will soon be announced.
Sunil Shah, CEO at o2h Ventures said: “We are pleased with the progress that the management team has made to commercialise the technology since its inception and they are very well poised to build more collaborations with pharmaceutics and biotechnology companies building both fee for service and licensing revenues”.
Dr. Fran Crawford, CEO of SomaServe, said: “o2h Ventures have been a supportive investor providing guidance and introductions when we have requested this from them. We are delighted that they continue to see the commercial potential of our platform”.
About SomaServe
Founded in 2018, SomaServe was spun out of UCL with the mission to build a uniquely positioned pharma service and specialist reagent business exploiting PolyNaut Technology to image live cells and improve the therapeutic viability of molecules with poor pharmacokinetic and chemical properties.
PolyNaut Technology is a versatile nano-engineered polymer technology for in vivo intracellular delivery. The resulting polymer nanoparticle vesicle is known as ‘the bionic nanoparticle’. The widely diverse polymer structure is highly flexible and can accept small molecules, peptides and proteins, antibodies, nuclear material, dyes and probes. The resulting nanoparticles then deliver their cargo to the interior of the cell, greatly enhancing the therapeutic efficacy of the encapsulated molecules. In addition, it is possible to functionalise the vesicle surface with targeting ligands to aid penetration of biological barriers such as the blood brain barrier and deliver to specific cells (Phenotypic Targeting). This cell delivery technology can also be successfully employed to enhance live cell imaging. The resulting CelLuminate suite of dyes have been developed to image live cells in vitro. CelLuminate has the benefit of significantly reduced cytotoxicity compared to industry standard cell imaging reagents. Cells under test can remain functional and viable for periods of up to fourteen days, giving researchers in industry and academia more time for image analysis.
The patented PolyNaut technology underpins SomaServe’s Precision Services offering. Precision Services provide bespoke drug discovery and product development services to pharma and non-pharma companies for proprietary molecules through the conduct of iterative feasibility studies and technology licence. The focus of the Precision Services division is to improve the therapeutic viability of potential therapeutic molecules with poor pharmacokinetic and chemical properties.
For more information see http://somaserve.com/home-somaserve
About o2h Ventures:
The o2h human health Fund is the first S/EIS fund in the UK solely focused on investing in EIS fund and/or SEIS fund seed stage companies covering novel drug discovery & AI, digital therapeutics and enabling services.
The o2h team are leaders in the biotech community and have been actively involved as investors, holding various board/industry positions as well as being engaged in grassroots scientific activity for over 20 years. o2h Ventures operates from their proprietary 2.7 acre Mill SciTech Park where they are developing a unique model for incubating small life science companies.
For more information about o2h Ventures Funds, please visit www.o2hventures.com
Media Contact:
Ajit Singh, Marketing Manager, ajit@o2h.com
