The University of Bristol spinout is working on adapting cell therapies to solid tumours.

Adam Perriman, professor of bioengineering at University of Bristol, is every tech transfer professional’s dream faculty member. He gained his PhD from Australian National University in 2007 – not long before the global financial crisis threw the world’s economies into turmoil – and immediately began pondering the benefits of spinouts, which were still a rarity at the time. “Things were looking rough in 2008,” he told Global University Venturing. “I was looking at the world and realised that the west does not really have anything left. If we do not start commercialising all this science – and very little was making it out beyond publishing at the time – then where does the value lie?” Although long proven right, with spinouts an increasingly important component of knowledge transfer across the world, it would take almost a decade before Perriman found his own perfect opportunity in 2017: CytoSeek. He came up with the name when he participated in University of Bristol’s 4-Day MBA programme with a view of launching a business, he disclosed. CytoSeek’s technology, he explained, “is centred on artificial membrane binding proteins. We design these protein constructs, which comprise an anchor domain that binds to the plasma membrane of cells and a functional domain that is the moiety we use to introduce added functionality to a cell. “The functionalities that we introduce are associated with the challenges of treating solid tumours with cell therapies. For example, we can augment the cells to improve their performance in hypoxic environments – think of it as little scuba tanks we put on the cell. We can switch them on or off, which you want, for example, for T-cells. “In practice, what we do is have the cells in vitro and put them in with a media, leave it on for 15 minutes, take it off and they are good to go.” Initially, Perriman’s interest lay in stem cell therapies for the treatment of postmyocardial infarction, and CytoSeek’s original intellectual property was about modifying stem cells for treatment after a heart attack, he recalled. But a consultant – hired at the behest of Bristol’s senior research commercialisation manager Andrew Wilson – cautioned the market opportunity for cardiac cell therapies was not worth pursuing because there were no approved treatments and nobody really understood how they might work. However, Perriman said, CAR T cell therapy did have “one approved product and a second was just being approved but it did not work for solid…

Subscribe to go deeper

GCV subscribers get access to all our proprietary data and deep-dive articles, as well as the global directory of CVC investors.



Not sure if you have a subscription?
Thierry Heles

Thierry Heles is the editor of Global University Venturing, host of the Beyond the Breakthrough interview podcast and responsible for the monthly GUV Gazette (sign up here for free).