London’s Alchemab Therapeutics secures €29.3 million as British Business Bank makes its largest life sciences investment yet

Alchemab Therapeutics, a London-based clinical-stage BioTech startup, has extended its Series A financing with €29.3 million (£25 million/$34 million) from the British Business Bank. This marks the bank’s largest investment in a life sciences company to date.

This additional funding brings Alchemab’s total Series A investment to date to €127.8 million (£109 million). The company plans to use this funding to build its clinical pipeline, grow its unique proprietary antibody dataset 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.”

Founded in 2019, Alchemab Therapeutics uncovers protective antibodies from disease-resilient individuals to discover and develop novel therapeutics. The company states that it uses well-defined patient samples, deep B cell sequencing, and computational analysis to identify convergent protective antibody responses among individuals that are susceptible but resilient to specific diseases.

The company identifies particularly resilient individuals and studies how they overcome or resist disease. It identifies these naturally occurring protective antibodies by analysing the antibody receptors of individuals who are resistant to or have recovered from disease. It then develops these antibodies into therapeutic products for broader use in patients who lack this protective response and are suffering from hard-to-treat diseases.

Alchemab sequences B cells from the resilient individuals and identifies antibodies with similar properties. Their antibody repertoires are then deeply sequenced, which results in millions of antibody sequences that feed into the company’s computational drug discovery engine.

“We discover the binding targets of the antibodies, understand their protective properties and subsequently develop therapeutic candidates that replicate the protective effect. Convergent antibodies are selected to enter a suite of target deconvolution and phenotypic assays to understand their binding targets and protective properties. We identify, develop and optimise potent therapeutic candidates that replicate the protective effect,” Alchemab explained on its website.

Alchemab notes that it discovers and develops 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.

The company also highlighted that 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). In May 2025, the company announced that it has entered into a licensing agreement with Eli Lilly and Company (Lilly) for ATLX-1282. The transaction, worth up to a total of $415m, includes an undisclosed upfront payment, potential discovery, development, and commercialisation payments and royalties. Under the terms of the agreement, Alchemab will be taking the programme through early Phase 1 clinical trials, after which Lilly will lead all further development and commercialisation.

Dr Carmine Circelli, Senior Investment Director, Life Sciences at British Business Bank said, “Alchemab is yet another example of the UK’s strength in leveraging technology in life sciences. By combining one of the world’s largest proprietary antibody datasets with advanced AI, the company has developed a powerful platform with the potential to unlock new treatments. Our investment will help convert promising results into high-value medical discoveries.” Alchemab’s current investors include SV Health Investors and the Dementia Discovery Fund, RA Capital, DCVC Bio, Eli Lilly, Lightstone Ventures, Ono Venture Investment, and Camford Partners.