Cell Mogrify gets £420k funding for regenerative cell therapies

UK cell therapy company Cell Mogrify has been awarded £420,000 funding from Innovate UK to accelerate its data-driven cell conversion programmes. The funding from the UK’s innovation agency will be used to transition three products to the preclinical stage, with potential application in wound healing and immuno-oncology. Currently, cells used in cell therapies either need to be extracted and sorted from the patient themselves or a donor or derived via experimental protocols that can take several years to develop. Mogrify aims to accelerate this process by using its bioinformatics platform to deliver an “efficient, safe and scalable” source of cells for the development of multiple personalized regenerative cell therapies. The company uses a systematic big-data approach to identify, from next-generation sequencing and gene-regulatory networks, sets of influential and non-redundant transcription factors or small molecules needed to drive the direct conversion of one mature cell type, such as fibroblasts, into another, such as T-cells.