Maxion Therapeutics Awarded £2 million Innovate UK Funding To Develop Ion Channel Antibodies For Hard to Treat Autoimmune Diseases
- Funding targets a critical unmet clinical need to treat autoimmunity, which affects around 300 million people globally
- Awarded as part of £25 million Innovate UK Biomedical Catalyst fund
Cambridge, UK – 15 February 2023 – Biotechnology company Maxion Therapeutics (‘Maxion’) today announced it has been awarded a prestigious GBP £2 million grant from Innovate UK, as part of its Biomedical Catalyst 2022 Round 2: Industry-led R&D funding competition. The funds will support the use of Maxion’s proprietary KnotBody® platform to develop antibodies to treat autoimmune diseases (AID) with high unmet clinical need. The funding, which originates from UK Research and Innovation, is part of a GBP £25 million investment in projects to support UK-registered businesses to develop innovative solutions to address significant health or healthcare challenges.
The funding follows Maxion’s announcement in February 2023 that it had completed a £13 million Series A financing, led by LifeArc Ventures, including Monograph Capital and BGF as equal participants.
The effective treatment of AID remains an important medical challenge and a significant area of unmet medical need. Currently, 4% of the world’s population, or around 300 million people, are thought to be suffering from over 80 different autoimmune conditions. In the UK alone, 4 million people live with an autoimmune condition, with the incidence increasing by 3-9% annually.
Antibody-based therapies have transformed the way chronic conditions like autoimmune disorders (AID) are treated, providing enhanced efficacy and safety while reducing the need for frequent administration. However, despite the success of current antibody therapies such as Humira, (the world's best-selling drug), a significant proportion of patients do not respond well to treatment. Moreover, these therapies can lead to broad immunosuppression, increasing the risk of infections. As such, novel treatments are required that can offer broader patient coverage while minimising adverse effects.
Several ion channels are implicated in the pathogenesis of AID, but these critical cell surface proteins are seen as a complex target class for antibodies, with no antibody-based drugs targeting ion channels currently approved or in clinical development. At Maxion, nature has provided the answer in the form of “miniproteins” (knottins) that block ion channels. When knottins are fused onto the surface of antibodies, the resulting “KnotBodies” combine the ion channel-blocking activity of knottins with the excellent drug properties of antibodies, including long half-life in the body and the ability to further engineer their properties. This innovative molecular fusion approach serves as the foundation for Maxion's patented KnotBody platform technology.
The company’s early R&D efforts have yielded KnotBodies to ion channel targets involved in AID, which will be further developed as selective and long-acting first-in-class and best-in-class therapeutics using Innovate UK funding.
Dr John McCafferty, CEO and co-founder of Maxion Therapeutics, said:
Dr Aneesh Karatt Vellatt, CSO and co-founder of Maxion Therapeutics, said:
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About Maxion Therapeutics
Maxion Therapeutics is a biotechnology company developing antibody-based drugs for previously untreatable ion channel- and G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR)-driven diseases, including autoimmune conditions, chronic pain, and cardiovascular disease.
The Company is developing a pipeline of potentially first- and best-in-class therapeutics using its proprietary KnotBody® technology to generate potent, selective, and long-acting therapeutics by combining naturally occurring mini-proteins (‘knottins’) with antibodies using state-of-the-art phage and mammalian display technologies. Maxion was founded in 2020 by highly respected biotech entrepreneurs and scientists Dr John McCafferty, CTO and Dr Aneesh Karatt-Vellatt, CSO. Dr McCafferty previously co-invented antibody phage display, which was the subject of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to his co-inventor Sir Gregory Winter. Maxion’s portfolio and growth is being advanced by a team of highly experienced leaders in the discovery and development of antibody-based drugs. The Company is based near Cambridge, UK and is backed by international blue-chip investors.
For more information, please visit: https://www.maxiontherapeutics.com/
