Be Your Own Fountain of Youth: Using Your Cells for Regenerative Medicine
/Chasing the Holy Grail of Cell Therapy
Helen Albert, Labtech.eu
Biotech entrepreneur Darrin Disley, ex-CEO and co-founder of the successful Cambridge gene editing biotech Horizon Discovery, has a new quest — creating the perfect cell therapy. He spoke to me about his position as CEO of new biotech Mogrify and why he thinks now is a good time to get into cell therapy.
Following the meteoric rise of Horizon Discovery from a small startup in 2007 to a company of 500 people and a market cap of more than €445M, Disley decided to step down as CEO of the gene editing company in February 2018. After taking a year off to travel and “get fit and healthy” he is now back in Cambridge and firmly back on the biotech scene to head up a new cell therapy biotech.
Mogrify, which has recently raised a seed round of €3.3M to kick start its technology development, specializes in transforming one type of cell into another. The key difference from other cell transformation methods is that the company can find the chemical recipe needed to flip one adult cell into another adult cell type, without transforming it into a stem cell first.
“If you could take a cell from one part of the body and turn it into any other cell at any other stage of development for another part of the body, you effectively have the Holy Grail of regenerative medicine,” enthused Disley.
