What are the hopes for 2025 for north east life sciences businesses?
We asked the innovative tenants of ONE BioHub what their hopes are for 2025. From groundbreaking research to industry-defining collaborations, these companies are shaping a vision of growth and opportunity will strengthen the region’s position as a hub for innovation. Their ambitions reflect a shared commitment to advancing science and contributing to the economic vitality of our community.
These pioneering businesses continue to expand and thrive, driving economic growth and solidifying the region’s reputation as a leader in the life sciences industry. By fostering innovation, creating jobs, and forging global partnerships, ONE BioHub tenants are laying the foundation for a brighter future.
Founder and CEO Dr Deborah O’Neil OBE FRSE at NovaBiotics commented:
NovaBiotics will accelerate its commercial activities throughout 2025, with the consumer health division of the Group scaling global sales of its nail health personal care products. This follows successful US and UK launches of the Tinexyl® range in 2024. Well done to all the team and our partners for reaching this major milestone and achieving remarkable results. R&D activities will continue throughout the year within both the personal care and pharma divisions of the Group, with exciting announcements anticipated throughout 2025 about clinical trials and partnerships for our anti-infective and respiratory disease therapy pipeline. The pharma division’s lead asset for pulmonary exacerbations of cystic fibrosis, NM001/Lynovex®, will advance further towards approvals and commercialisation.
Relocating NovaBiotics and NovaBiotics Consumer Health to ONE BioHub was another key milestone for the Group in 2024, with our new ‘home’ being the perfect location – within the physical core of the region’s life science ecosystem – from which to achieve our goals for 2025 (and beyond) as a commercial-stage biotechnology business.
Dr Deborah O’Neil, deputy First Minister Kate Forbes and Prof Craig Ritchie
Scottish Brain Sciences founder Prof Craig Ritchie said:
With the beginning of 2025, we enter our third year of operations, and are poised to build on the strong foundations we’ve established since 2022. With a proven model for driving research and real-world impact, 2025 will be a year of significant growth and progress. We anticipate transformative levels of engagement in our research studies across our Scottish centres, reinforcing our role as a catalyst for breakthroughs in brain health. At the same time, we are preparing to further expand our business model beyond Scotland, ensuring our expertise and approach can reach and benefit even more people. The base in ONE BioHub allows us to expand our research offer to the north east, and bring research opportunities to participants in that region. This is new for us after a pilot period in the summer of 2024, so we are excited to build on that! It's critical to us to offer opportunities in a number of bases around Scotland, and this is the first example of this.
After two years of rapid progress, we are committed to accelerating our efforts. The momentum we have built means that 2025 will be "more of the same"—but in every sense, much more.
Lorna Duguid and Aldo de Pape
Aldo de Pape, Founder at Genomes.io stated:
At Genomes.io, we are excited about the opportunities that 2025 holds as we build on the strong foundation that we have built. In 2024, we achieved significant growth— after we closed our investment round in June we expanded our user base by 160% and reached 5,000 sign-ups at the start of this year. This surge in users drove a 445% increase in tests run on our platform, fuelled by the addition of nearly 40 new genotypic health reports.
In 2025, we aim to keep this momentum by launching more health reports and onboarding hundreds of new users each week as we continue to educate people about protecting their most valuable asset—their genome. This year, we also look forward to forging partnerships across the healthcare sector, as well as within the Decentralized Science and Finance ecosystems. One of our proudest milestones in 2024 was our collaboration with the Opentensor Foundation. Together, we are developing an AI predictive algorithm focused on drug response using synthetic genomic data, which is set to launch in 2025."