STL is leveraging its deep sector expertise as a venture builder to unlock the true value of innovation. Working alongside a network of investors and service providers, its strategic commercialisation process helps its customers build IP-led businesses that are viable and sustainable. It does this by applying streamlined entrepreneurial capabilities, in-house engineering and end-to-end due diligence for ventures bringing new technologies to life from basic concept to prototype demonstration, enhancing their growth and scalability.

Extracellular is developing cell culture technologies to use the cell samples of living animals and plants to create sustainable alternatives to commercial products in the cosmetic, material and food industries. As a bioprocessing and manufacturing partner, it provides solutions from cell-line and scale-up development to facilitating routes to market, supporting other biotech companies seeking to develop greener consumer products such as cultivated meat, dairy products, leather, cotton and active ingredients for cosmetics.

EnsiliTech is improving the shelf-life and global accessibility of vaccines and other biological therapeutics by combatting cold chain transport and storage issues. Its novel ensilication technology, designed for both existing and new biopharmaceutical formulations, encases thermally unstable biomolecules within silica nanoshells to prevent environmental degradation. This eliminates the need for cold chain requirements that are expensive, prone to failure and generate significant carbon dioxide emissions.

GenomeKey is transforming how healthcare clinicians diagnose and treat infections like sepsis to improve patient outcomes. Using cutting-edge machine learning and DNA sequencing, the company is developing a next-generation diagnostic device to identify bacterial genomes and determine their antimicrobial susceptibility directly from patient blood in just a few hours, rather than days. This enables clinicians to prescribe the right antibiotics for patients with much more efficiency and accuracy, reducing costs, minimising unnecessary antibiotic use and ultimately saving millions of lives from the world’s leading cause of death.

Hone Bio is revolutionising drug delivery using lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) and exploring their potential across multiple therapeutics, including cell and gene therapies, vaccines and autoimmune diseases. Its NanoPilot platform technology engineers LNPs to target specific cell types with extreme precision to optimise drug effectiveness by minimising off-target effects that tend to accumulate in the liver. This unlocks new possibilities for using LNPs to safely treat diseases in other parts of the body that require maximum target specificity in their drug delivery.

Scarlet Therapeutics is developing a proprietary platform that generates novel red blood cell-based therapeutics (tRBCs) to treat a wide range of diseases. Its technologies are underpinned by learnings from decades of research including the groundbreaking RESTORE clinical study run by NHS Blood and Transplant and the University of Bristol, investigating transfusion of lab-grown blood into patients. By generating tRBCs with high levels of therapeutic proteins from cell lines rather than from donated stem cells, Scarlet Therapeutics aims to address significant efficacy and manufacturing issues faced in the field.