MORF-Bio secures funding to accelerate microbial digital twin platform
MORF-Bio has secured an Innovate UK Investor Partnerships Award, unlocking a new investment round led by Deeptech Seed Fund and matched by Helix Research and Enterprise.
The funding marks an important step in the next phase of MORF’s development, helping us bring together our growing suite of microbial bioinformatics tools into a connected platform centred around a Microbial Digital Twin.
Building on the MORF Platform
Since MORF-Bio was founded, our aim has been simple: to make advanced microbial bioinformatics more accessible to researchers. As biological datasets continue to grow in size and complexity, many researchers still face the challenge of navigating multiple software packages and specialist workflows to answer even straightforward biological questions.
We’ve been developing browser-based tools that remove many of these barriers, allowing researchers to explore microbial genomes, visualise multi-omics datasets and perform metabolic modelling through an intuitive online platform. This new funding will help us take the next step.
Bringing Genomes, Models and Multi-Omics Together
The project will focus on integrating these capabilities into a single platform where genomes connect to predictive metabolic models and multi-omics data.
Our vision is to create a microbial digital twin that allows researchers to ask questions such as:
How might this strain respond to a genetic modification?
What effect could a change in growth conditions have on metabolism?
Which pathways are likely to change under different environmental conditions?
By combining these different layers of biological information, researchers can generate new hypotheses, explore “what-if” scenarios and gain deeper insight before returning to the laboratory.
Supporting better research
We’re building these tools with the needs of microbiologists in mind.
By reducing the amount of manual data processing and making advanced modelling more accessible, we hope to help researchers spend less time moving data between software packages and more time interpreting results.
The platform has applications across industrial biotechnology, engineering biology, antimicrobial resistance, sustainable biomanufacturing and microbial research, helping organisations make better use of increasingly valuable biological datasets.
Looking ahead
Joyce Bennett CEO of MORF-Bio said
This funding will integrate MORF's diverse capabilities to build a microbial digital twin, ultimately transforming industrial biotechnology and accelerating drug discovery.
Over the coming months we’ll be expanding the platform with new modelling capabilities and working closely with researchers to ensure the tools address real scientific challenges.