Alchemab Therapeutics Secures Series A Funding to Transform Drug Discovery with Immune Memory
September 12, 2025
byFenoms Start-Up Research
Alchemab Therapeutics Ltd, a pioneering biotechnology company, has announced the successful close of a Series A funding round, raising an undisclosed amount. The round included participation from a powerhouse roster of investors: Ono Venture Investment (OVI), RA Capital Management, SV Health Investors, DCVC Bio, Lightstone Ventures, and pharmaceutical giant Lilly.
Led by Jane Osbourn OBE, a highly respected figure in biotechnology and former senior executive at MedImmune, Alchemab is taking a bold approach to drug discovery. The company leverages the natural immune responses of people who demonstrate unexpected resilience to serious diseases such as cancer, neurodegenerative conditions, and infectious diseases. Instead of starting from scratch in drug development, Alchemab studies these resilient individuals and learns from their immune memory to discover therapeutic antibodies.
A Revolutionary Approach to Therapeutic Discovery
Traditional drug discovery has long relied on hypothesis-driven approaches, where researchers begin with a target and test compounds against it. While effective, the process is often slow, expensive, and riddled with uncertainty. Alchemab’s method flips the model on its head. By harnessing machine learning, advanced bioinformatics, and patient-derived data, the company identifies antibodies already proven to function in real-world biological defense.
This “reverse translation” approach not only accelerates discovery but also raises the probability of clinical success, since the underlying biology has already been validated in resilient patients. The implications for healthcare are enormous: faster development timelines, lower costs, and higher chances of bringing meaningful therapies to market.
Strategic Investors and What Founders Should See
The caliber of Alchemab’s backers is a strong indicator of market confidence. RA Capital Management and SV Health Investors are globally recognized for their deep expertise in biotech, while DCVC Bio specializes in companies at the intersection of biology and data science. The involvement of Lilly, a top global pharmaceutical player, underscores the commercial viability of Alchemab’s approach and opens doors to potential partnerships down the line.
What’s striking about Alchemab’s strategy is not just its science - it’s the way it reframes a problem that has challenged pharma for decades. Instead of chasing endless hypotheses, the team asked: what if the answers already exist within the most resilient patients? This reframing is a powerful reminder for founders in any industry. Sometimes the key to disruption isn’t creating something entirely new, but uncovering hidden value in plain sight. By studying outliers, leveraging natural systems, or tapping into underutilized data, startups can leapfrog conventional approaches.
For founders, the lesson is clear: when designing your product or model, don’t only look at average users or predictable datasets. Look at the extremes - the power users, the resilient anomalies, the exceptions that thrive when others fail. That’s where game-changing insights hide. Alchemab built its company around this principle, and it transformed a high-risk, low-probability process into one with both scientific depth and investor confidence.
Scaling Science into Impact
Alchemab’s platform has already generated a robust pipeline of antibody candidates across oncology, neurodegenerative disease, and infectious diseases. By coupling insights from resilient patient cohorts with state-of-the-art sequencing and computational techniques, the company is able to identify and validate therapeutic targets at speed.
CEO Jane Osbourn has emphasized that the company’s mission extends beyond discovery. By integrating AI and machine learning at every stage, Alchemab is designing a scalable platform that can continuously learn and improve as more patient data is added. This creates a virtuous cycle: the more data, the sharper the insights, and the greater the likelihood of identifying transformative therapies.
The Road Ahead
With the new funding, Alchemab will accelerate the development of its lead antibody programs, expand its discovery engine, and grow strategic partnerships with pharmaceutical companies. The financing also strengthens its ability to attract top scientific and computational talent, positioning the company to remain at the cutting edge of the biotech revolution.
Alchemab’s approach could redefine the way new therapies are developed. Instead of waiting decades and investing billions for each new drug, the process could become faster, cheaper, and more patient-centered - ultimately democratizing access to treatments that were once unthinkable.
Why Alchemab Matters
As the biotech industry races toward integrating AI, data, and biology, Alchemab stands out as a company that combines deep scientific expertise with a bold rethinking of the drug discovery model. The support of top-tier investors and pharma partners signals that its vision is not only scientifically sound but commercially promising.
In many ways, Alchemab represents the future of biotech: patient-centered, data-driven, and capable of scaling discoveries that were once locked in complexity. Their Series A raise may be undisclosed in numbers, but the impact it represents is crystal clear - a new era of drug discovery, rooted in immune resilience, is underway.