A UK-based synthetic biology startup has brought in $58 million from private investors to fund its work engineering cell systems that can manufacture new and existing molecules.
The company, called Constructive Bio, has its roots in the lab of Jason Chin, a leading scientist at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge. Chin, who also serves as the company’s founder and chief scientist, published a study in 2019 showing his lab synthesized the entire E. coli genome with a more compact genetic code.
Constructive’s Series A was led by Ahren, OMX Ventures and Paladin Capital Group, and also included investments from Fine Structure Ventures, +ND Capital and Jonathan Milner, the founder of research tools supplier Abcam. Nobel laureate Sir Gregory Winter, known for his work on antibody drugs, will join Constructive Bio’s board as a representative of Ahren.
The company plans to use the funds to continue to work on several programs, including one making incretin mimetics — a drug class that includes the blockbuster obesity medicines Wegovy and Zepbound from Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly.
“We’ve shown that we can, at Constructive, make semaglutide analogs and incretin mimetics,” Chin said. “Two things that we’ll use this fundraise for [are] to further explore the incretin mimetics that we can make using our technology, and to look at the scalable production of incretin mimetics, because there’s a lot of challenges about the ways they’re currently made — using lots of solvents. There’s a real inability to meet the projected global supply.”
Chin also highlighted how Constructive’s platform could potentially help build better antibody-drug conjugates, where they can tweak the stability, half-life, and targeting abilities of proteins that are manufactured.
Constructive previously announced a $15 million seed raise in 2022, and has raised a total of $75 million to date. Chin said the company is “pretty much commercially ready — we can make things at commercial titers. We can introduce a wide range of building blocks. We’ve done a lot in the seed phase. We’ve done a lot of the optimization from the academic lab into the company that we felt we needed to do.”
The UK company’s raise comes as other, once high-flying synthetic biology companies have faced significant challenges. Ginkgo Bioworks announced earlier this year that it was cutting spending and laying off staff.
“The underlying proposition that biology can ultimately deliver the ability to do things that really can’t be done by any other means, that it can do things in a way that is greener and more sustainable, is ultimately correct,” Chin said. “But there will be in any sector — there’ll be a range of different opportunities.”