Clinical-stage biotech Alchemab Therapeutics has extended its Series A financing with a £25 million ($34 million) investment from the British Business Bank – the Bank’s largest investment in a life sciences company to date. The funding will enable the company to build its clinical pipeline and grow its unique proprietary antibody dataset to more than a billion sequences.

Alchemab is discovering and developing first-in-class drugs through its Resiliome platform, which uses complex AI-derived algorithms to identify naturally occurring antibodies present in humans with unusual resilience to a range of hard-to-treat diseases.

This investment builds on the success of the company’s first asset, ATLX-1282 – a first-in-class antibody therapeutic in clinical development for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) which was licensed to Eli Lilly and has provided robust validation of the potential of the Resiliome approach.

The additional funding brings Alchemab’s total Series A investment to date to £109 million. It will enable the company to enhance its antibody database from 500 million to a billion antibody sequences and advance additional candidates into clinical development.

Dr Jane Osbourn, CEO and Co-Founder of Alchemab, said, “We are delighted that British Business Bank has recognised the importance of enabling Alchemab to grow and thrive here in the UK. This investment provides further validation of the sustainable, long-term potential of our drug discovery platform and will enable us to further accelerate our pipeline of first-in-class antibody therapeutics for conditions with significant unmet need.”

Dame Kate Bingham, Managing Partner at SV Health Investors and Chair of Alchemab’s board of directors, said, “The UK life sciences sector has the expertise, creativity and commercial potential to build globally significant biotech companies, and Alchemab is determined to be one of them. This investment by the British Business Bank demonstrates the importance of providing capital to allow innovative biotechs to scale here, and we are proud to be building the company’s future in the UK.”