British start-up company Mogrify Ltd (Cambridge, UK) has added US$16m from a Series A round to its US$3.7m seed financing in February 2019. Existing investor Ahren Innovation Capital led the round, with Parkwalk, 24Haymarket, and the University of Bristol Enterprise Fund III participating.
The company has developed a unique scalable technology for direct cellular transdifferentiation, based on the FANTOM5 dataset of human regulatory elements for gene expression and characteristic gene expression data of any human cell. Its platform technology transdifferentiates cells without going through a pluripotent stem cell- or progenitor cell-state such as induced pluripotent stem cells. Using small molecule factors and transcription factors, Mogrifiy can directly convert every existing sort of cell into another cell type overcoming the limitations of growth factor-based cellular reprogramming.