xCystence Bio, a Monash University biotech company, has secured a top-up funding boost from Brandon BioCatalyst’s CUREator incubator to drive the development of urgently needed therapeutics for Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD).
Top-up funding rounds recognise innovations that received initial seed funding from CUREator and have gone on to demonstrate substantial progress. The top-up brings CUREator’s total grant funding awarded to xCystence Bio to AU$750,000.
Led by Australia's Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI) and the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS), xCystence Bio highlights the importance of backing spin-out companies by enabling them to translate early-stage discoveries into practical, commercial endpoints that deliver better health outcomes and grow Australia’s biotechnology community.
PKD is a family of genetic diseases in which multiple large cysts form in the kidneys. It’s a progressive condition which typically worsens over a patient’s lifetime and is one of the leading causes of renal failure requiring dialysis or transplant.
xCystence Bio was originally identified by CUREator as an early-stage biomedical innovation with long-term potential due to the group’s identification of a cell signalling pathway which is active in PKD and which, when blocked in PKD disease models, prevents the formation of new cysts and the growth of existing ones.
The top-up funding moves the programme to the next crucial stage of providing proof of concept in treating the disease.
CUREator is a national biotechnology incubator run by Brandon BioCatalyst to support the development of Australian biomedical research and innovations. Funded by the Medical Research Future Fund and Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, CUREator provides grant funding programs for opportunities spanning from discovery to clinical development.
