Cyclana Bio named inaugural Cambridge Science & Technology Torchbearer 

CTO Jonathan Griffiths collected the Award at the Business Weekly Awards Dinner at Queens’ College, Cambridge, on Wednesday 16 September.

Delivered by Innovate Cambridge in collaboration with Cambridge Innovation Capital, the Torchbearer Award was created to recognise a different dimension of technology excellence: companies where commercial success is inseparable from measurable societal value.

For the judging panel, Cyclana Bio stood out as a particularly compelling example of that philosophy.

Ambitious science, focused on an overlooked need

Founded in 2024, Cyclana is developing a new approach to drug discovery for chronic diseases, beginning with endometriosis – a condition affecting one in 10 women for which there is currently no curative treatment.

Its core innovation is a human-tissue-first disease-modelling platform that looks beyond diseased cells to the extracellular matrix – the physical scaffold surrounding cells and a key driver of inflammation and fibrosis.

Rather than relying on conventional models that can fail to reproduce the complexity of human disease, Cyclana recreates healthy and diseased human tissue in the laboratory using patient-derived material. The aim is to identify treatments that can reverse disease rather than simply suppress its symptoms.

The company has already built working models of endometriosis, banked tissue from 40 donors and launched an NHS observational study recruiting 500 women. Its early research has provided evidence that the extracellular matrix itself can drive the defining functional signature of endometriosis, and that this process can be reversed.

The judging panel described this as a particularly convincing case for why existing approaches have failed to address the underlying disease.

Importantly, judges also recognised the strength of the scientific evidence relative to Cyclana’s stage of development. At just two years old, with a team of ten and £5m raised in its 2025 pre-seed round, the company remains firmly in the discovery stage. There is not yet a candidate molecule and its NHS study is still recruiting.

That context made the progress to date all the more significant.

Where science and societal value meet

What particularly distinguished Cyclana was that its societal purpose is not separate from its scientific strategy.

The company has placed women’s health at the heart of its mission, tackling an area that has historically been under-researched and under-served. Patient involvement is part of the scientific process, with patient communities informing the work and the company’s CEO bringing lived experience of endometriosis to the organisation.

Its contribution also extends beyond its immediate research.

Cyclana has built a skilled scientific team in Cambridge, drawing researchers from academia into industry, while developing plans for paid early-career opportunities as it grows. It has secured an iCASE PhD studentship with the University of Manchester and is developing another with Cambridge.

Its research is connected deeply into the regional ecosystem through collaborations with the University of Cambridge, Cambridge University Hospitals, the Cambridge Endometriosis Endoscopic Surgery Unit and Babraham Institute, alongside research relationships with Warwick and Manchester.

As the judges noted, “purpose drives every aspect of the business.”

Responsible innovation by design

For Cyclana, responsible innovation is also reflected in how its technology is developed and how its outputs are handled.

Its human-tissue models provide a route towards reducing reliance on animal testing in early-stage drug discovery, in line with the 3Rs. At the same time, the company has made an explicit commitment to open research data where it can be shared for public benefit.

That combination – tackling an overlooked healthcare need, involving patients, reducing reliance on animals and making new knowledge more accessible – was central to the judges’ assessment.

One judge described the approach as “precisely what the Torchbearer Award was created to recognise.”

Another highlighted Cyclana’s “clear long-term commitment to addressing an under-served healthcare need”, alongside its open-data ambitions and consideration of alternatives to animal testing.

A platform with ambitions beyond endometriosis

Cyclana’s ambition extends beyond developing a treatment for endometriosis.

The company believes the underlying biology it is modelling is relevant to a much broader group of chronic inflammatory and fibrotic diseases. Its five-year ambition is to select an endometriosis drug candidate and move towards the clinic, while proving a wider approach to developing therapies that address the causes of chronic disease.

Success would therefore have significance on two levels: delivering new treatment options for women with endometriosis while demonstrating the potential of a broader, human-relevant approach to drug discovery.

For the judges, this combination of ambition and purpose was particularly compelling.

Cyclana itself perhaps summed up the philosophy most clearly in its application: “building a serious business and serving patients the system has overlooked are one ambition, not two.”

That is precisely the kind of thinking the Cambridge Science & Technology Torchbearer Award aims to champion.

Congratulations to Cyclana Bio on becoming the inaugural Cambridge Science & Technology Torchbearer! Congratulations also to Bicycle Therapeutics, OtoImmune and Owlstone Medical on reaching the finals – an outstanding achievement and a fantastic showcase of the strength and ambition of Cambridge’s science and technology ecosystem.

Photograph by Phil Mynott.