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Engitix Receives a Golden Ticket to LabCentral from Takeda to Advance Fibrosis and Solid Tumour Research

November 5, 2019 Off By BusinessWire

Golden Ticket includes one year of lab bench space at Cambridge, MA-based shared laboratory and office space

LONDON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Engitix Ltd (‘Engitix’), a private company focused on drug discovery for fibrosis and solid tumours based on its pioneering human extracellular matrix (ECM) platform, announced that its subsidiary Engitix, Inc, has been awarded a Golden Ticket to LabCentral by Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited (Takeda).

The Golden Ticket provides Engitix one year of lab bench space at LabCentral, a world-class shared laboratory and office space in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It includes access to LabCentral’s shared infrastructure and services, such as first-class lab, facility, and administrative support, skilled laboratory personnel, and participation in LabCentral’s training programme and seminars. Engitix will use the Golden Ticket to advance its human extracellular matrix (ECM) research in fibrosis and solid tumours disease progression.

“We are honoured to have received this Golden Ticket from Takeda, bringing us immediate access to a world-class bioresearch facility. It is a first step in developing Engitix’s presence in the United States and I look forward to building our network in Cambridge and across the USA more widely. We are also delighted that Takeda, a leader in the area of gastrointestinal diseases, has recognised the potential in Engitix’s ECM technology,” said Dr Giuseppe Mazza, Engitix co-founder and CEO.

Engitix has developed the world’s first proprietary drug discovery platform based on tissue-specific and disease-specific human ECM scaffolds. The company’s 3D human ECM scaffolds provide an enabling tool for a better understanding of the role of the ECM in disease development and progression, leading to the identification of more relevant targets for drug discovery and biomarker development. A key current limitation in developing more effective treatments in fibrosis and for various solid cancers has been the absence of human ECM in experimental models.

Engitix’s mission is to increase the quality of therapeutics targets selected for development and a reduction in the number of later-stage drug trial failures by establishing more advanced platforms for drug target identification and validation, in which healthy as well as diseased cells can be tested with potential therapeutic agents within their natural physiological and pathological microenvironment.

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About Engitix Ltd

Engitix was established in 2016 to develop and commercialise research at the UCL Institute for Liver and Digestive Health, Division of Medicine. The Company was founded by Professor Massimo Pinzani and Dr Giuseppe Mazza and owns the first platform in the world based on tissue-specific and disease-specific human extracellular matrix scaffolds. Engitix is headquartered at the Royal Free Hospital in London, UK, with its wholly-owned US subsidiary Engitix, Inc based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In November 2018 it closed a £5m series A financing.

For more information, please visit www.engitix.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/engitix-limited/