Alchemab extends Series A with £25m from British Business Bank
Cambridge-based Alchemab Therapeutics has added £25m (€29m) to its Series A financing, taking the round to £109m (€128m) and giving the UK biotech fresh capital to advance its AI-enabled antibody pipeline.
Why it matters: The investment is the British Business Bank’s largest direct life sciences investment to date, and comes as the UK tries to keep more high-growth biotech companies scaling at home.
Backstory: Alchemab raised an initial £60m Series A in 2021 to advance programmes in neurodegeneration and cancer. It later added a $32m Series A extension after moving its lead asset, ATLX-1282, into clinical development.
- The latest extension adds public-sector capital to a syndicate that already includes SV Health Investors, Dementia Discovery Fund, RA Capital, DCVC Bio, Eli Lilly, Lightstone Ventures, Ono Venture Investment and Camford Partners.
How it works: The company uses its Resiliome platform to search for naturally occurring antibodies found in people who show unusual resilience to hard-to-treat diseases.
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The approach combines deep sequencing, AI-based analysis and lab validation to identify antibodies and targets that could become new therapeutics.
- Alchemab said the new funding will help expand its proprietary antibody database from 500 million to more than one billion sequences.
Zoom in: Alchemab’s lead asset, ATLX-1282, is a first-in-class antibody therapeutic in Phase I for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). In May 2025, Eli Lilly signed a deal worth up to $415m to secure post-Phase I development and commercialisation of ATLX-1282.
- In addition, Alchemab is also advancing ATLX-2847 in muscle atrophy. Phase I is anticipated for Q4 this year, confirmed Jane Osbourn, Alchemab’s CEO, in an email to European Biotechnology Magazine.
Yes, but: Alchemab’s raise comes against a tougher UK biotech financing backdrop. UK biotech equity financing fell 49% in 2025, while venture capital funding dropped 13%, according to the latest report from the UK BioIndustry Association.
- Last year, several major pharma groups have also cooled UK investment plans, including AstraZeneca pausing a £200m Cambridge expansion and cancelling a separate Liverpool vaccine investment, MSD pulling UK R&D operations and scrapping a $1.31bn London research centre, and Eli Lilly pausing plans for UK biotech lab space.
The bottom line: The British Business Bank’s £25m investment gives Alchemab more runway, but it also carries a wider signal that the UK is trying to plug a scale-up funding gap through public support.
