- Houdini Bio has secured around £1.5 million in grants and pre-seed funding, with SCVC leading the investment.
- The company’s software changes therapeutic DNA so that a patient’s own cells do not turn it off.
- According to the startup, this solution can increase gene expression by more than ten times compared to competitors.
Houdini Bio just raised about £1.5 million by combining non-dilutive grants, which do not require giving up equity, with an oversubscribed pre-seed round.
SCVC, the venture arm of Science Creates, led the round, while Deep Science Ventures and Cambridge Enterprise VC at the University of Cambridge also participated, according to the company. Houdini Bio develops software that redesigns therapeutic DNA so the body’s defences do not attack it.
The body’s defence system is at the heart of this story. A protein complex called HUSH often confuses the DNA used in gene and cell therapies with a virus and turns it off. This is why treatments that succeed in trials can lose effectiveness in real-world use.
“Cellular machinery still rejects these therapies, limiting long-term effectiveness and forcing costly, unsafe doses. Our platform introduces a vital shift from trial-and-error screening to repeatable, engineering-driven DNA design,” Jonathan Cohen-Gold, Houdini Bio’s chief executive, says.
The financial stakes are high. The global gene therapy market is expected to grow from $10.04 billion in 2026 to $25.89 billion by 2031, according to Mordor Intelligence. However, this growth has been accompanied by years of high manufacturing costs and disputes over reimbursement, making durability one of the industry’s most costly and unresolved challenges.
A Cambridge discovery sparked this innovation
Cohen-Gold discovered the molecular workaround during his PhD at the University of Cambridge, building on Professor Paul Lehner’s identification of the HUSH complex.
He co-founded Houdini Bio with Lee Dunham, the chief business officer, who spent over ten years working with more than 100 cell and gene therapy companies as a director at the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult. Dunham has seen firsthand why promising therapies sometimes fail.
Founded in 2025, the startup uses machine learning to analyse a therapy’s genetic sequence before it reaches patients. This helps predict which DNA versions can bypass HUSH’s defences and remain active.
For example, a CAR-T therapy, which re-engineers a patient’s immune cells to fight cancer, often loses strength within weeks because the inserted gene is silenced. With Houdini Bio’s approach, such therapies could stay active longer at lower, safer doses.
Many companies are racing to improve durability
Houdini Bio is not the only company focused on durability. nChroma Bio, created when Chroma Medicine merged with Nvelop Therapeutics in December 2024, raised $135 million in a Series B led by Google Ventures. At the same time, Dyno Therapeutics, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, uses AI to solve a different problem: engineering the viral shells that deliver gene therapies into cells.
While these companies focus on delivery methods or silencing disease genes, Houdini Bio believes the key is in the DNA sequence itself. The company says its approach increases gene expression more than tenfold over current leading methods, based on its own preclinical data.
“Gene therapies really do represent the future of medicine, but they are stuck behind an invisible commercial and biological bottleneck,” says Harry Destecroix, SCVC’s managing partner. He has experience in this area, having co-founded Ziylo, a Bristol spinout that Novo Nordisk acquired in 2018 for up to $800 million. SCVC’s broader portfolio also includes deep-tech spinouts such as Delta g, Scarlet Therapeutics, and Isomab.
The company says this is Houdini Bio’s first public funding round, with all three named backers being new investors. No valuation was shared. Houdini Bio reports that it reached its technical milestones in just a third of the expected time and plans to use the funds to grow its team and form co-development partnerships with pharmaceutical companies.
