Flagship Pioneering is leveraging its year-old London outpost to forge new research collaborations across the pond. The biotech incubator is teaming up with the U.K.’s Cambridge University Health Partners and the Milner Therapeutics Institute to advance breakthrough science and technologies, the firm announced Jan. 23.
Through the deal, Flagship’s portfolio of more than 40 companies will be able to access the organizations' science and technology, clinical translation and trial support, and data assets and biosamples, according to the release.
Scientists and students in Cambridge, England, can in turn pursue professional development opportunities through Flagship, the company said, including through the Flagship fellowship. Flagship is based in the other Cambridge, in Massachusetts.
The partners will further cooperate with other big players in the U.K. life sciences space, Flagship said, including the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, the University of Cambridge and the Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
“We expect to see further momentum in cooperation between the U.K.'s rich research and life science networks and Flagship and its companies,” Flagship senior partner and U.K. head Junaid Bajwa, M.D., said in the release. “Flagship has already witnessed firsthand how the U.S. and U.K. Cambridge ecosystems can potentiate each other's innovations.”
That firsthand experience came around the same time Flagship formed its London office in November 2023. That same month, the company launched Quotient Therapeutics, its first U.K.-based biotech. Quotient is using genome sequencing to identify new drug targets across a range of therapeutic areas, from obesity to rare neurological disease.