The GM&C Life Sciences Fund is a seed and early stage venture capital fund targeting life sciences businesses located in the Greater Manchester and Cheshire & Warrington region.  The Fund is managed by Catapult Venture Managers (''Catapult Ventures''). The Fund is based at Alderley Park, which is well recognised as a site of national importance, being the largest life sciences campus of its kind in the UK with more than 500,000 sq. ft. of top-end laboratory and related space and facilities. Until recently, the Park was the R&D headquarters for AstraZeneca. Since 2002, Catapult Ventures has backed a significant number of companies across a broad range of life sciences, including therapeutics (such as Abzena and Oxford BioTherapeutics), medical devices (such as Monica Healthcare and Probe Scientific), contract research organisations (such as R5 Pharmaceuticals and FDAS), diagnostics developers (such as Lumora and Biofortuna), as well as developers of technology used in healthcare applications (such as Oxford Cryosystems and Accutronics).  The Fund is the result of a collaboration between Cheshire and Warrington Enterprise Partnership, Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Cheshire East Council, and Manchester Science Partnerships.

GM&C Life Sciences Fund

The team behind Catapult Ventures are among the most experienced venture capital investors in the UK. Their experience spans a range of sectors from healthcare and pharmaceuticals to luxury consumer brands, manufacturing and software, as well as all stages: from start-ups and pre-revenue IP developers to company floatation and billions of pounds in revenue.  Their administration team is equally experienced with each member having more than 10 years experience in a venture capital environment.

Catapult Ventures

Arlabion

Arlabion is an agri-tech company developing a novel seed treatment to protect crops against fungal infection. Arlabion's technology is a seed treatment that enhances the plant immune system response against pathogens, improves seed germination, facilitates root system development and reduces the risk of fungal disease. Arlabion's technology is targeted at a large and fast-growing market opportunity for less toxic and damaging agents to address the fungal infection in important food crops. Arlabion makes use of well-proven organic chemistry more traditionally applied to human and animal healthcare into agriculture.

<div><p>Arlabion is an AgriTech company that focuses on sustainable crop management and protection. It offers Trivazen, a new-generation approach to plant protection that enhances plant immune system responses against fungal pathogens. It interacts with the cell membrane, but this is not a genetic modification to plant the structure. Moreover, the company’s product reduces disease levels by up to 70% and destroys microorganisms completely, increasing plant yields. Trivazen is used for seed treatment, foliar applications, or as a stand-alone disinfectant of water or planting material. Headquartered in the UK, Arlabion is privately held.</p></div>

Enhancing seed and crop traits via biotechnology

Crop Biotech

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    Arlabion is an AgriTech company that focuses on sustainable crop management and protection. It offers Trivazen, a new-generation approach to plant protection that enhances plant immune system responses against fungal pathogens. It interacts with the cell membrane, but this is not a genetic modification to plant the structure. Moreover, the company’s product reduces disease levels by up to 70% and destroys microorganisms completely, increasing plant yields. Trivazen is used for seed treatment, foliar applications, or as a stand-alone disinfectant of water or planting material. Headquartered in the UK, Arlabion is privately held.
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<p><span>Lone Star Industrial Materials is a cultivation company that manufactures raw hemp materials. Its product portfolio consists of bast fiber, refined cellulose, and hemp hurd, seeds, hearts, fines and oil. Additionally, it offers retail products such as HempSorb, animal bedding, and hemp control socks. Hemp requires less land, improves nutritional health, is environmentally friendly, helps soil regeneration, grows in various climates, absorbs a great deal of CO2, is a rotational crop and reduces waste. Hemp is used in construction, insulation, bioplastics, and as hemp wood. The privately held company has developed an end-to-end supply chain from seed genetics to delivery.</span></p>

Lone Star Industrial Materials

<p><span>PLANTeDIT operates in the plant genome editing field to produce improved crop species through transformation technology and a CRISPR/Cas9 delivery system. It produces regulatory-free, consumer-oriented, DNA-free and sustainable genome edited crops and biopharmaceuticals. The company’s offering includes non-transgenic high oleic soya, which is produced by mutating the FAD2 gene, which eventually increases the oleic oil content in the soya bean. This product was developed through a collaboration between PLANTeDIT and ToolGen. The organization has also collaborated with RebelBio, University College Cork and IAPB. Headquartered in Cork, Ireland, PLANTeDIT is privately held.</span></p>

PLANTEDIT

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    Amforo is a biotech company that focuses on developing foods that are high in protein by enhancing the nutritional density of food and feed crops through the platform of technologies it has built. The company offers a family of feed and food crops, including primary ingredients for suppliers of plant-based meat and dairy alternatives. In addition, it is focused on developing a low-cost, plant-based source of protein for farmed seafood. Moreover, Amforo is pursuing approaches to enhance the nutritional profile of crops as well as their protein content, which entails optimizing amino acid profiles, modifying carbohydrates, and enhancing micronutrients.
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Amfora

<p><span>BioHeuris provides weed management solutions by combining synthetic biology and gene editing to develop herbicide resistant crops. Its offering includes Heurik, a technology platform that integrates rational design and directed evolution to identify mutations that confer herbicide tolerance, while Swap is the platform that introduces these mutations in crops using gene editing. The company cultivates soybeans, sorghum, rice, cotton, and alfalfa. It has partnered with Santa Rosa Semillas, Adecoagro, Gensus, GDM, Aceleradora Litoral, Tobin, Rotam, Asociación de Cooperativas Argentinas, Benson Hill, and Plant Science Center. Headquartered in Rosario, Argentina, BioHeuris is privately held with an office in the US.</span></p>

BioHeuris

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    Tropic Biosciences is a privately held developer of high-performing commercial varieties of tropical crops that promote cultivation efficiencies, improve sustainable environmental practices and enhance consumer health through its use of cutting-edge genetic editing technologies. Its GEiGS Technology combines gene editing and RNAi in a single platform that enables critical disease resistance and quality improvement traits. The technology caters to the banana production, row crops, livestock, and poultry industries. The company’s partners include Temasek, Agronomics, Polaris Founders Capital, and Excellence Through Stewardship. Headquartered in the UK, Tropical Biosciences has been featured in The Telegraph, Nature, Fast Company, and the Financial Times. 
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Tropic Biosciences

Companies that develop or use biological, physical and chemical agents and techniques to provide protection and improve the quality of a seed. This includes the sale of seed coating, or seed enhancement products as methods to treat seeds.

Companies that redesign large clusters of genes and gene parts rather than modifying or engineering a single gene for improving the traits of a plant.

Companies that utilize genetic engineering tools and technologies to use existing and naturally present gene variants in a plant and the natural process of breeding such as inbreeding, and linebreeding to develop better traits for plants.

Companies that use transgenesis processes like tissue culturing to develop transgenic plants or seeds by inserting new genes into them from other plants or in certain instances other organisms like bacteria or even animals.

Companies that offer techniques such as epigenetics, RNA interference (RNAi) to temporarily block a specific gene that would trigger unwanted effect such as a disease on a plant.

Companies that develop a platform to insert, edit, or delete the DNA of a plant itself using approaches such as CRISPR-Cas 9, TALENs, and Zinc Fingers. These approaches help develop plant genes or seeds with traits such as disease-resistant, enhanced-performance, or improve yield.

Biotech solutions to produce crops that are sustainable and offer better traits

Offers customization of genes and traits as required by farmers

Uses AI/machine learning to facilitate their platform/biotech processes like gene editing

Arlabion

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