Spinning out: Apeikon Therapeutics

The team, including Professor Maya Thanou and Dr Maral Amrahli, both based in the Institute of Pharmaceutical Science (Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine), share their insights on their commercialisation journey to date. 

Commercial potential

Maya: The Apeikon journey started in 2013. I was finishing a research project funded by a EPSRC grant. Alongside collaborators at Imperial, we were using MRI equipment to explore a focused ultrasound effect on nanoparticles and had started to prepare a report on the initial findings. The results were so good that we thought maybe we could use this technology as a therapeutic intervention.

Around the same time, King’s put a call out for projects seeking commercialisation support. We were one of six projects selected out of 1,300. Submitting my idea and talking to advisors about its commercial potential gave me confidence. With the help of IP & Licensing we took our concept and continued to develop the IP, and I’m glad we did, to prevent it from becoming another publication.

Through Innovate UK grants, Maral was also able to join the company full-time. Her PhD work further highlighted and confirmed the growing potential with our technology, so it was at this point that we realised that it needed to be commercialised and translated into a product. Maral asked hundreds of stakeholders, clinicians, particular neuro-oncologists, and healthcare professionals what they would like to see from our technology. She did the so called ‘customer discovery’ and this is how we secured our thinking, that this is an IP worth pursuing.

The team

Maral: Now there are five people working on this project. Maya is the CEO, as the inventor with experience in nanomedicine for many years. I’m the Chief Operations Officer (COO). Our third co-founder has a pharma background, and we have a King’s senior scientist, funded by Innovate UK, who is helping to build our data. We also have a business advisor who advises on strategy, which is crucial. Coming from an academic background, the business side is very important, it’s key for us to have a good strategy, especially for a deep tech product like ours. 

Technology

Maya: Our non-invasive technology targets anti-cancer drugs at the tumour, through an activation technique that comes from ultrasound, guided by MRI. We have focused on brain cancer initially, for which there is currently no treatment. Through our technology, we can open barriers in the brain and activate nanoparticles in the brain tumour only, rather than anywhere else in the body. This enhances the safety and effectiveness of anti-cancer drugs.

Our technology can be applied to treat other tumours too. Many people are suffering with the side effects of anti-cancer drugs which are toxic and potent. Our aim is to make these drugs more bearable and less damaging to healthy tissue. In doing so we can reduce the number of chemotherapy cycles, thereby reducing treatment costs overall.

Spinning out

Maya: We have a licensing agreement in place at King’s, so we are a spinout of King’s. King’s owns part of the company, and they support us with our activities. Through the university we have access to clinicians, trusts and hospitals to explore potential. The relationship is advantageous because we have the backing of the academic environment and access to labs for further testing. Knowing what I know now, I wish I considered spinning out much earlier. It’s taken years for me to bite the bullet and make the decision because it’s scary! 

Maral: What’s the point of doing research if it’s going to sit on a bench doing nothing? There’s so much important research being done in labs, but people don’t know what to do with it. Whilst we are PhD students we need to learn what our research can mean in the future, what we can do with it and how we can work with the university to make it more commercially available to the people who actually need it.

Maya: Apeikon is at the stage now where we need to progress to clinical trials, so further financial support would be helpful. We need to be able to validate our technology outside of our own environment, to remove bias and demonstrate the potential to others outside the university.

Accelerator

Maya: I’ve taken part in a couple of Accelerators before joining the King’s Accelerator. The King’s Accelerator gave us access to incredible people. We met experts and received investment when we needed it through King’s Investor Network. I wish I had joined earlier, so that we could apply the lessons we learnt and been investment-ready sooner. We’re good with grants, but big investment is a whole different play.

Maral: It was great to speak to others on a personal level and share experiences over coffee. You realise your struggles are not just your own! The intervention of the accelerator was life saving for me. Even now, post-accelerator we’re still able to ask questions and receive quick responses from the Entrepreneurship Institute team.

Looking ahead

Maral: We need to get some more funding. That’s a number one priority. We want to expand our team because we all have lots of competing priorities. We’ll keep applying for grants and will continue preparing papers and reports.

Maya: Eventually we would like to move out into our own premises. That would be ideal, having our own lab and own scientists working on it. This year we’re trying to get as many investor meetings as possible to get their feedback, to see what more they want from our data and how we can develop the technology further.

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The King's Spinout Accelerator is a 12-month programme dedicated to supporting the translation of inventions, born from ground-breaking research across King's College London. 

To learn more about Apeikon Therapeutics, visit their website.