Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC) is backing two early-stage British biotechs with unconventional approaches to chronic disease. Flip Therapeutics and Nascent Therapeutics each receive £500,000 from Innovate UK, administered through MDC, plus access to MDC’s translational drug-discovery expertise and its network of advisers and partners. Venture firm Zinc is a co-investor in Nascent.
What a Catapult is, and why the structure matters
MDC is part of the UK’s Catapult network — publicly backed innovation centres created to bridge the gap between academic research and commercial development. That gap has a name in drug discovery: the valley of death, the stage at which a promising laboratory finding needs expensive, specialised, unglamorous work — assay development, compound characterisation, delivery formulation, scale-up — that grant funding rarely covers and venture investors are reluctant to finance before it is done.
Read against that, £500,000 is not the substantive part of the offer. It is seed-scale money, enough for a defined set of experiments rather than a development programme. The access to facilities and expertise is what actually moves a platform from interesting to investable.
Flip Therapeutics: reprogramming immune cells inside the body
Flip is developing a platform to reprogramme T cells directly within the body, converting disease-driving cells into anti-inflammatory ones using nanoparticle delivery.
The conventional approach to engineering T cells removes them from the patient, modifies them in a facility, and infuses them back — the model behind CAR-T cancer therapies. It works, and it is expensive, slow and logistically demanding. Doing the reprogramming in vivo removes the manufacturing step entirely, which is why in-body cell engineering has become one of the most actively pursued ideas in the sector.
Flip’s targets are autoimmune and inflammatory conditions including psoriasis and alopecia areata — a category affecting roughly one in ten people in the UK. The funding will support payload validation, integration with nanoparticle delivery, and demonstrating scalability.
“This combination of financial support and access to expertise gives us the opportunity to execute the experiments that matter most,” said co-founder and CEO Dr David Pajerowski.
Nascent Therapeutics: moving mitochondria between cells
Nascent, a University of East Anglia spinout, is pursuing something stranger. Its platform regulates mitochondrial transfer through tunnelling nanotubes — thin membrane channels that cells extend to one another, through which they can pass cargo including whole mitochondria.
Mitochondria generate cellular energy, and mitochondrial dysfunction is implicated across ageing and a long list of diseases. The idea is that if cells naturally donate healthy mitochondria to damaged neighbours, that process could be deliberately enhanced to restore function in failing tissue.
Initial focus is Parkinson’s disease, with potential extension to other neurodegenerative conditions, cancer, COPD and osteoporosis. “With this funding, we will develop our pipeline and platform as we work to develop truly novel therapies,” said co-founder and CEO Stuart Wood.
Two very different risk profiles
It is worth noting how unlike each other these bets are. Flip is applying an increasingly validated concept — nanoparticle-delivered in-body cell engineering — to a new therapeutic area. The mechanism is fashionable and well capitalised elsewhere; the execution risk is in the specifics.
Nascent is building on tunnelling nanotubes, real biology but early and incompletely characterised, with no precedent for therapeutic control. If it works, it opens a genuinely new modality. The chance it does not is correspondingly higher.
That spread is arguably the point of a public translational funder, which can absorb risk profiles that a purely commercial investor at this stage would not.
What the money actually has to prove
The stated uses of Flip’s funding — payload validation, nanoparticle delivery integration, and scalability — read as jargon but describe three concrete failure modes, and they are the ones that kill delivery platforms.
Payload validation asks whether the genetic cargo actually reprogrammes a T cell as intended once it arrives, in a real cell rather than an idealised system. Delivery integration asks whether the nanoparticle reaches the right cells in the body in sufficient numbers — the perennial obstacle, since particles injected into the bloodstream tend to accumulate in the liver and spleen regardless of what they were designed to target. Scalability asks whether the formulation can be manufactured reproducibly at volume, a question that has stopped otherwise promising platforms after the biology was proven.
Each is answerable with a defined set of experiments rather than a development programme, which is exactly the scale of work this kind of funding is designed to buy.
The realistic outlook
Both companies are early-stage and preclinical. Neither has a clinical candidate, and the funding rounds described here are orders of magnitude below what a first-in-human trial requires. The honest expectation is that this money buys the data needed to raise a real Series A — or to establish that the platform does not work, which is a legitimate and cheaper outcome to reach early.
The broader signal is about the UK’s translational funding model: small, targeted public investment paired with shared infrastructure, aimed squarely at the stage where good academic science most often stalls. Business news, not investment advice.