Sebastian Nijman is co-founder of Scenic Biotech and Associate Professor of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at Oxford University. He will talk about the new venture Scenic Biotech, an international collaboration from Oxford University and the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI). The therapeutics spinout company raised €6.5m in Series A financing, which will be used to develop its ‘genetic off-switch’ for cancer and rare genetic diseases. The round was co-led by Netherlands-based life sciences investor BioGeneration Ventures (BGV) and peer INKEF Capital, with the participation of Oxford Sciences Innovation (OSI), the university venturing investor for Oxford University.
Sebastian Nijman: “With this financing from a strong Anglo-Dutch venture capital syndicate, we will build the company to discover and develop a completely new class of therapeutic targets. Just as gene mutations can cause disease, we now know they can also protect us from disease. However, this insight has not yet been used for target discovery as the identification of such disease suppressing genes has been essentially impossible. Our new technology can now unlock this “dark matter” of our genome.” Sebastian Nijman will address the technological background of the company and the business model it uses for its drug discovery and development programmes.