Hampton, UK – 11 March 2021 – Touchlight, a biotechnology company focused on enzymatic DNA production to enable the genetic medicine revolution, today announces a £42 million fundraising round led by Bridford Investments Limited. The round builds upon Touchlight’s funding strategy to date, focused on a network of ultra-high net worth individuals, family offices and specialist healthcare investors.

The proceeds will allow the Company to more than triple its manufacturing footprint, and increase capacity to up to 1 kilogram of GMP DNA per month once fully operational in Q1 2022, enabling Touchlight to address commercial demand for mRNA vaccines.

Touchlight has developed a unique synthetic DNA vector, called dbDNA™ (“doggybone DNA”), with multiple advantages over traditional plasmid DNA manufacture. GMP dbDNA can be produced more rapidly than pDNA (weeks versus months) and is produced with equipment in a significantly smaller footprint, enabling simple scale up of DNA production.

The addition of 11 new state-of-the-art DNA production suites at Touchlight’s unique London premises, a converted Victorian Waterworks building, will bring the total to 15. The benchtop scale of the technology means the total facility footprint will be 7,500 sq ft, a fraction of the space required by conventional bioreactor-based plasmid DNA manufacture. The investment will also allow the creation of up to 60 jobs.

Touchlight’s CDMO arm, Touchlight DNA Services, already supplies GMP materials to leading players in the genetic medicines industry and the Company expects significant further growth across viral vectors, cell therapy, mRNA and DNA vaccines.

About Touchlight

Touchlight is an innovation-driven leading CDMO pioneering enzymatic GMP DNA production to enable the genetic medicine revolution. As pioneers, with an FDA Drug Master File accepted in 2022 followed in 2025 with the world’s first cell-free DNA GMP license, Touchlight’s enzymatic DNA technology is on the cutting edge of AAV, mRNA, DNA vaccine, and gene editing technology with its state-of-the-art facility recognised by ISPE’s Facility of the Year Awards (FOYA) for Innovation.

With multiple client products already in the clinic, Touchlight’s evidence-based, synthetic DNA manufacturing solutions offer a scalable, sustainable alternative to plasmid DNA (pDNA) for all stages of pre-clinical, clinical and commercial development. The company and technology are built on the conviction that DNA is fundamental to the future of medicine. Traditional methods, based on bacterial fermentation, are slow, costly, and unable to meet the growing demands of genetic medicine due to limited scalability and speed. Founded in 2007, Touchlight’s team is inspired by breakthroughs in genetic medicine, recognising the urgent need for innovative DNA production techniques to support the future of genetic therapies.

For more information please contact:

Karen Fallen, Chief Executive Officer
Verna McErlane, Chief Commercial Officer
E: info@touchlight.com
T: +44 20 8481 9200