University fund makes £1m investment in gene therapy

The University College London Technology Fund has announced an investment of up to £1 million for the development of gene therapies

The fund, which invests in intellectual property commercialisation opportunities arising from UCL’s research base, is pledging the sum to biopharmaceutical company Freeline Therapeutics.

Freeline is developing and commercialising gene therapies for bleeding and other life threatening or debilitating disorders. The therapies, which are from one single treatment, have the potential to provide long-term benefits to patients by carrying a therapeutic gene to a target cell in the body, according to the company.

Freeline was founded in December 2015 by investment firm Syncona and UCL Business, the wholly-owned technology transfer company of UCL.

This is the fund’s third investment since inception and has been made alongside Syncona’s £25 million Series A financing.

Freeline’s Adeno-associated virus (AAV) gene therapy platform has been developed by Amit Nathwani, professor of haematology at UCL, and it builds on the successful haemophilia B phase I/II trial that he conducted alongside the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

The results of the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, demonstrated that all ten treated haemophilia B patients showed a safe, sustained expression of blood clotting Factor IX from a single treatment.