#UK X factor wins almost $30m in a week for medical pioneers

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superx, medicxi johnson & johnson innovation, cambridge

Serial UK medical entrepreneurs Trevor Baglin and Jim Huntington have started yet another new business in Cambridge with multi-million dollar global funding – their second company launch in a week.

The duo have reunited the XO1 founding management team to launch SuperX with $11 million Series A Funding with Medicxi and Johnson & Johnson Innovation (JJDC) to develop antibodies with anticoagulant properties.

The SuperX team is engaged in the discovery of antibodies against an undisclosed target in the blood coagulation cascade. SuperX hopes to reach the clinic in 2019.
Exactly seven days ago the entrepreneurs launched Apcintex to target cures for haemophilia, raising around $18m in the process.

Baglin and Huntington were the medical brains behind X01 which was sold to Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc in March 2015.

SuperX CEO David Grainger told Business Weekly: “Jim & Trevor are unique. SuperX is their fifth Medicxi backed company.

“XO1 is among the most successful UK biotech stories ever so it’s really exciting to see the XO1 team re-united with $11m behind them from Medicxi and JnJ to create a new start-up at Babraham.”

Baglin is chief medical officer at SuperX and with Grainger and Huntington, SuperX reunites the entire management team that founded XO1 Ltd.

Huntington, Professor of Molecular Haemostasis at Cambridge University and chief scientific officer for SuperX, said: “SuperX is taking a novel approach to specifically block the thrombosis that causes heart attacks and strokes, which we hope will deliver the ideal anticoagulant treatment for chronic use.”

SuperX has also recruited XO1 veterans Bob Schroff as its operations chief and Jo Davies as its intellectual property manager. Grainger is a partner at Medicxi, the life sciences investment team that spun-out from Index Ventures at the start of 2016.

The SuperX approach is based on observations from unusual case studies in patients. “These experiments of nature have shone a light on the intricacies of blood coagulation pathways that have evaded conventional reductionist science for decades,” explained Baglin, whose eye for an unusual clinical phenotype underpins SuperX.

Based at Babraham Research Campus, SuperX will operate as a virtual biotechnology company, with no internal operations, using an established network of out-sourced drug discovery and development providers, many of which are co-located on the campus.

Grainger said: “Cambridge today leads the world with the strength-in-depth of high quality outsourced drug discovery companies, which gives a virtual start-up like SuperX the ability to compete with global pharmaceutical companies at a fraction of the cost.” 
 

from Business Weekly http://ift.tt/2k6QOYB

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