MucoLife, a COPD drug learns to scale
SEK 1 million, about €91,000, is a small number in biotech. It pays for a step that decides whether a drug stays a lab result: making it in a form that can be repeated.
The company is MucoLife Therapeutics from Gothenburg, a spin-out of Göteborgs universitet, set up with GU Ventures, the holding company connected to the university, which describes itself as both an incubator and an investor. On 6 November it announced the grant from Vinnova, Sweden's innovation agency, through a call for small and medium-sized companies to use life science infrastructure.
The product is MLT-001, an inhaled peptide meant to dissolve the mucus plugs that block airways in COPD. According to the company, mucus plugging is present in more than half of patients with moderate-to-severe COPD, and no approved therapy targets it directly. The molecule comes from around 40 years of research at the Mucin Biology Group at Göteborgs universitet.
What the grant pays for: a scalable manufacturing process, developed with a contract manufacturing partner, plus a transferable process description and control strategy for later GMP production. Co-founder and CEO Thaher Pelaseyed says: "Manufacturing is the step that turns a promising molecule into a medicine." He adds that the support lets the company "move closer to clinical trials."
The accelerator link is in the US. In September 2024, Health Wildcatters, the Dallas seed accelerator, picked MucoLife as one of ten startups from nearly 700 applications. It was the program's first Swedish startup. The announced investment came without an amount or named investors.