Touchlight secures government grant to support its £14m investment in scale-up DNA manufacturing
Published: 29 March 2023
Hampton, UK, 29 March 2023 – Touchlight, a CDMO pioneering enzymatic DNA production to enable genetic medicines, today announced that it has secured a grant from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology to support the acceleration of its £14m scale-up DNA manufacturing programme.
The grant comes from the £277 million in joint government and industry backing delivered through the Life Sciences Innovative Manufacturing Fund. The Fund was launched to support Life Sciences businesses investing in manufacturing projects in the UK. Touchlight will use the grant funding to support its acquisition of scale-up equipment and accelerate its facility expansion in Hampton, UK. The grant will also help drive Touchlight’s ability to enable client API (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient) programmes in late-stage development and commercialisation.
As a result of the funding, in parallel with the facility expansion, Touchlight will be the first company globally to reach commercial scale with enzymatic DNA technology and will be ideally positioned to supplant plasmid DNA as the primary source of DNA manufacture for advanced therapy by producing multi-kg of DNA per annum.
Making the announcement, George Freeman, Minister of State (Minister for Science, Research and Innovation), visited the Touchlight site in Hampton on Tuesday 28th March, taking a tour of the new GMP manufacturing facility as well as the Quality Control, Analytical and Innovations laboratories and meeting the Touchlight team.
“The UK’s £94 billion Life Science sector provides over 250,000 high skill jobs across the UK from drug discovery to diagnostics, medtech devices and digital health.
The industry is being transformed by the pace of change: from AI to genomics, bio manufacturing to smart stents and personalised immunotherapies, technologies are converging to create a new era of advanced digital products.
That requires new types of advanced manufacturing plant which is why we set up the Life Sciences Innovative Manufacturing Fund, which today’s news shows is working: converting £17 million grants to four companies into £260 million industrial investment.”
George Freeman, Minister of State for Science, Research & Innovation
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
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