After raising nearly £1.5M to prove the science, Houdini Bio emerges from stealth with a breakthrough designed to help genetic medicine reach its full potential.
Houdini Bio team accentuates: “Thanks to an incredible team of scientists and backing from Science Creates, Deep Science Ventures and Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, we have delivered in 6 months what we initially thought would take us 18.”
When genetic medicines are silenced, efficacy fades over time, leading to disease progression or relapse. Drug developers battle against silencing with huge doses, often bringing production costs beyond $1M/patient and risking life-threatening toxicity.
For decades, the industry has tried to work around this with trial and error approaches that are ineffective and unreliable.
With a new molecular rule book for DNA design in hand, we used AI to accelerate our platform, a system that rewrites therapeutic DNA to evade innate silencing pathways without altering its intended biological function, applicable across gene therapies, cell therapies and biomanufacturing.
Houdini’s team
Every genetic therapy faces the same invisible ceiling: the cell treats therapeutic DNA like an intruder and acts to suppress it.
This pattern was noticed by Houdini’s Chief Business Officer, Lee Dunham, during his time as Director of BD at the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult, working across 100+ startups. And during his PhD at Cambridge, Houdini’s CEO Jonathan Cohen-Gold,Phd discovered novel escape routes from this silencing mechanism.
Photo: Jonathan Cohen-Gold, CEO, Co-Founder of Houdini Bio
29.06.2026.
