Adrestia Therapeutics in overdrive as it hires from new Cambridge HQ

14/07/2021

Cambridge life science business Adrestia Therapeutics is scaling fast as it accelerates its mission to rebalance disease and restore health.

The trailblazer, backed by Ahren Capital and GSK, has now set up its HQ on the Babraham Research Campus and has been actively recruiting over the past six months.

Co-founder Professor Steve Jackson told Business Weekly: “We are making exciting progress with our internal ‘Disease Rebalancing’ programs and have also initiated our collaboration work with GSK. 

“Adrestia aims to continue with its recruiting and to further ramp up its scientific and business operations over the rest of this year.”

As we reported last December, Adrestia won undisclosed Series A investment from GSK to progress technology designed to restore diseased cells by deploying a different gene in the cell to counter harmful genetic defects.

We added that the collaboration could be worth an initial $1 billion to the Cambridge startup. Professor Jackson co-founded the enterprise with colleagues in his lab alongside influential investment business Ahren Capital.
Adrestia is developing therapeutics that work in an entirely new way – restoring the biological balance in damaged, diseased or dying cells.

Many of the most challenging medical problems facing us today, such as cardiovascular disease, dementia and other neurological conditions, cancer and many genetic disorders, are caused by faulty molecular pathways that lead to cellular dysfunction or death.

Adrestia is searching for novel therapies that suppress or over-ride these harmful pathways and keep cells healthy. It’s a concept known as synthetic viability.

Professor Jackson said on launch: “It may seem counter-intuitive, but our research has shown that combining two biological changes – one causing the disease and the other induced by a treatment – can re-establish normality within cells to ensure their health and proper functioning.”

Adrestia is using precision genetic models to search for innovative new therapeutic targets, precision diagnostics, novel drug compounds and new applications for existing drugs.

It is also combining its knowledge of the molecular ‘fingerprints’ of sickness and health with computational tools to match detailed disease profiles to therapeutic approaches that are most likely to work.

Professor Jackson said: “Building on our successes based on genetic diseases caused by defective DNA repair, we are now expanding our programs to include a range of other conditions caused by cell dysfunction.”

Published on: 08.07.21