The spin-out company XO1, which Jim Huntington at CIMR is Founder and Director of, has won the Business Weekly Startup of the Year Award. This was presented on Tuesday March 18th by Peter Cowley of Martlet at the Business Weekly gala dinner in Cambridge. He commented: “XO1 A new company has been formed with $11 million startup capital to commercialise a “one in a billion” Cambridge UK medical breakthrough that is being compared to Fleming’s discovery of penicillin 85 years ago. Based on a freak discovery at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, XO1 is developing a novel anticoagulant that has the potential to prevent heart attack and stroke without causing bleeding.”
XO1 Ltd was founded last year with $11 million investment from the life sciences investor Index Ventures to develop a new anticoagulant drug, ichorcumab. This synthetic antibody against thrombin has the potential to save millions of lives by preventing heart attacks and strokes without causing bleeding. Its development arose from a collaboration between Jim Huntington at CIMR and Trevor Baglin at Addenbrooke’s hospital, after treating a patient with a head injury who had a naturally occurring form of this antibody. Ichorcumab is set apart from existing anticoagulants in that it promotes anticoagulation without increasing bleeding risk, and thus it has been hailed the ‘holy grail’ of anticoagulant drugs.
