I’m going to need you to sit with this number for a second. Eighty-three percent complete tumor eradication. In glioblastoma. From a single injection. No recurrence over 11 months of follow-up.
Trogenix, the Edinburgh-based gene therapy company that barely existed two years ago, just dropped preclinical data in Nature for its Synthetic Super-Enhancer (SSE) platform, and it’s the kind of result that makes you re-read the abstract.
Here’s what makes the approach clever. The SSE constructs are basically Trojan Horses, AAV vectors loaded with a dual payload: an HSV-TK suicide gene system (activated by the prodrug ganciclovir) and IL-12, an immune-stimulating cytokine. The trick is the targeting. These synthetic enhancers only switch on inside cancer stem cells driven by SOX2/SOX9 transcription factor networks. Normal brain tissue? Barely a whisper of expression.
So you get direct tumor cell killing and local immune activation in one shot. The IL-12 arm generated durable immunological memory, which means even when researchers re-challenged the models with new tumor cells, the immune system remembered and fought them off.
Trogenix — from founding to Nature in under 3 years
2023
Founded from Prof. Steve Pollard’s research at University of Edinburgh
Oct 2025
£70M Series A led by IQ Capital. Eli Lilly, 4BIO Capital, Cancer Research Horizons participate.
Early 2026
GMP manufacturing of TGX-007 completed at Viralgen in under 12 months
Apr 2026
Preclinical data published in Nature. Phase 1/2 trial open for GBM patients.
The speed here is worth paying attention to. Founded in 2023, £70 million Series A by October 2025 (with Eli Lilly on the cap table, which tells you something), GMP manufacturing done, Phase 1/2 trial now open, and a Nature publication to back it all up. That’s an aggressive timeline for any biotech, let alone one tackling glioblastoma.
And they’re not the only ones chasing GBM right now. Myosin Therapeutics just started its own Phase 1/2 with MT-125 across Mayo Clinic sites. Altido Therapeutics raised a $12.5M seed for a CAR-T approach to GBM. The space is heating up because the unmet need is enormous: only about 25% of GBM patients survive past one year.
Trogenix thinks the SSE platform can extend beyond brain cancer into colorectal liver metastases and hepatocellular carcinoma. They’ve got five IND applications planned within five years. That’s ambitious. But when your preclinical data publishes in Nature and shows 83% cure rates with durable immunity, you kind of earn the right to be ambitious.
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