The Collaborative to Innovate scheme is funded by Research England and managed by MedCity, a cluster organisation that promotes life sciences in London and the greater south east.

The project will combine Sixfold’s Programmable Oligonucleotide Delivery System (PODS) with Prof Mimi Hii’s (ROAR) expertise in catalytic reactions and their applications in organic molecule synthesis. November 2019 marks the kick-off of this invaluable and exciting innovation project.

By promoting collaboration between academia and industry, MedCity’s ‘Collaborate to Innovate’ funding scheme fosters a supportive environment to accelerate the development of innovations into commercial products and services This most recent round has focused on advanced therapies projects and is an initiative of London Advanced Therapies.

On the other side of the partnership in Sixfold’s grant project is the ROAR at Imperial College London. Conveniently co-located with Sixfold at White City’s Research and Innovation campus, it offers state-of-the-art facilities, focusing on data-centric research and implementation of computing and automation in chemical molecule synthesis. By enabling rapid execution and analysis of reactions, reaction efficiency, selectivity, and robustness are optimised. With the help of the ’Collaborate to Innovate’ funding, Sixfold’s collaboration with ROAR is aimed at leveraging ROAR's cutting-edge high-throughput capabilities to optimize the therapeutic efficacy of PODS platform technology.

Prof. Mimi Hii from ROAR, says:

“Supporting SMEs in the burgeoning UK’s biotech sector is an important mission for ROAR, and so we are delighted by the opportunity to collaborate with Sixfold. ROAR will provide state-of-the-art automated equipment to accelerate the synthesis of new molecular entities with greater biological efficacies, helping to stimulate the exciting early-stage discoveries that will lead into innovations and commercial processes.”

Crucially, the collaboration will be extremely valuable for expediting the completion of the pre-clinical development of Sixfold’s drug delivery technology.

Sixfold Bioscience is a venture-backed preclinical-stage biotechnology company based at the Innovation and Translation Hub in White City, London. Sixfold develops nucleic acid-based drug delivery systems, with a current focus on Cell & Gene therapeutics such as short interfering RNA for gene silencing and messenger RNA for gene expression. For more information, visit: https://www.sixfold.bio