PepGen spun out from the University of Oxford (OU) and the Medical Research Council (MRC), a biotech company focused on the peptide-mediated delivery of nucleic acids. The intellectual property underpinning PepGen’s technology platform was developed through a decade-long collaboration between Professor Matthew Wood (OU) and Dr Michael Gait (MRC). The company’s co-founders are Dr Caroline Godfrey and Dr Giles Campion, with Dr Godfrey taking the CEO role.
PepGen received an initial £2.5M of seed funding from Oxford Sciences Innovation (OSI) and will focus on the pre-clinical validation of the company’s peptide delivery platform before building towards the commercialisation of this technology across a broad range of indications. These activities will be guided and supported by PepGen’s founding Board of Directors, Dr Wood, Dr Godfrey and Dr Andrew Mclean (OSI).
The company has a chemistry lab of 44 m2, a biology lab of 21 m2 and an office of 15 m2 in the BioEscalator, with the option to move into larger premises as the company expands. The company is currently outfitting these spaces to build internal synthetic and analytical capabilities, with peptide synthesisers, Maldi-ToF, quantitative HPLC and RT-PCR/qPCR devices among the critical pieces of equipment.