Atelerix: Taking the Cold Chain Out of Biological Sample Transport

Atelerix is a great example of a science-led company backed by Cambridge Angels. The Newcastle-based company has developed a hydrogel technology that allows fresh cells, tissues, blood and other biological samples to be stored and shipped successfully at ambient temperature, without the usual cost, risk and carbon footprint of the traditional cold chain.

We recently sat down with their CEO Alastair Carrington, who joined the company in early 2024 and has since led its transformation from a promising post-academic spin-out into a commercially focused business which is now contracting with some of the world's largest biopharmas and CROs.

What’s your background and how you came to lead Atelerix?

Alastair trained as a scientist, but quickly realised the lab wasn't for him and moved into commercial roles, beginning his career at the BioIndustry Association. “That was a real launch pad,” he explains. “It gave me access to CXOs across biopharma, diagnostics and academia, attending 20 to 30 events a year. It was a huge opportunity to be a sponge and absorb as much as possible about the dynamics of the industry.”

He went on to join a series of biotools companies. At one, he helped grow annual revenues from around £800k to over £3 million in three years, but on his 30th birthday he handed in his resignation, moved to Edinburgh and set up his own consultancy helping companies raise investment and sharpen their commercial strategies. It was there that a familiar Cambridge Angels name entered the story. One of the companies he was supporting was a portfolio company of Andy Evans and, having helped them secure their first large pharma customer, Andy then introduced him to Atelerix.

What does Atelerix do, and why is moving away from the cold chain such a big deal?

“The cold chain is fraught with inherent risks,” Alastair says. “It's expensive, it's unreliable, and it relies on dry ice being topped up and temperatures being controlled throughout. Very often these shipments fail and highly valuable samples degrade and become unusable.”

There is a subtler problem too as the freeze-thaw process puts a lot of stress on samples. As modern assays dive deeper into multi-omic markers, there is consequently more and more noise from the shipment process. Atelerix instead enables a low-cost, high-quality sample to be shipped whilst retaining its full functional performance. Crucially, the approach still works alongside existing practices rather than replacing them; laboratories can freeze their samples for the future if they wish.

What was it like taking the science from the lab to a commercial product?

When Alastair joined at the start of 2024, the company had strong technology but had not yet built the commercial engine to match it. As he puts it, the company was actually in a really good position in terms of technology and identifying the real industry need. What it needed was dedicated commercial resource; they hadn’t yet invested in targeted marketing campaigns or put proper internal sales processes in place.

2024 became the year for this and he was quickly able to build on the founding team's groundwork. “Whenever anyone develops a product, it very rarely ends up in the hands of the customer you first imagined. What the founders had done incredibly well was beta test extensively. It was from that experience that I could step back and say, ‘are these the right customers?’ ”

How do you decide which markets to target next?

Atelerix focuses on the largest one-to-many opportunities. The biggest customers it works with are large biopharma and large CROs as they control the movement of these samples across the industry. This then pointed the company towards developing solutions for fresh, patient-derived samples: blood, tissue and increasingly the complex 3D models, such as organoids, on which modern precision therapeutics depend.

“Standardisation is everything for these models” says Alastair. “It's like a cookbook; everyone owns a Gordon Ramsay cookbook but that doesn't make you Gordon Ramsay at home. We enable suppliers to standardise their offerings and then ship these as products rather than services. This is a huge benefit to the whole industry.”

Blood has already emerged as the leading sample shipped by Atelerix’s customers. It degrades within a few hours, so being able to store whole blood fresh and transport it for days to a week or more is hugely advantageous, particularly as it remains by far the most acquired sample type from patients.

And what are your goals for the company over the next two years?

“Growing fast!” Alastair says, although this growth will be in revenue rather than headcount. “We're not an AI product, but we are very much an AI-enabled company, which lets us stay lean.”

The biggest opportunities are geographic, with agreements already signed with commercial partners in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, where the cold supply chains are less mature than in the West and the room for accelerated growth is greater. The ambition is to scale from around 100,000 units a year to millions, and to become a default fixture in laboratories worldwide.

He describes an almost “Intel Inside” model for the company. “Whatever people are shipping, they end up shipping it in our branded encapsulation tube, with our protocols. At high volumes that becomes self-marketing, and our revenues start to look far more like a SaaS model than a typical, gradual life-science build-up.”

How has having Cambridge Angels in your investor group assisted you?

“Oh, hugely,” is Alastair's immediate response. The process of coming to the Angels sharpens up your pitch anyway, he notes, because they are a group of sophisticated investors who turn up and ask the hard questions. With ten Cambridge Angels on the cap table, the company also has access to an invaluable network, both for peers and for customers.

That support also extends into the boardroom. “We've ended up with two Cambridge Angels on the board; Sunil Shah, who is our chair, and Andy Evans, one of our NEDs. Sunil in particular could not be a bigger champion; any opportunity he gets, he shouts about us and connects us openly to his network.”

And finally, we understand you're currently fundraising?

“We're raising £1.5 million as a pre-Series A,” Alastair confirms. The timing, he argues, is compelling. “We're at a commercial inflection point. We have several large enterprise customers finishing validation studies, and just one of them doing what they say they will take us to profitability, so this round will enable us to convert these enterprise customers, increases our high volume manufacturing readiness so we can meet that demand and create significant value for shareholders.”

Atelerix is another compelling example of Cambridge Angels backing deep science to tackle a genuinely global problem. Any founders or investors who would like to learn more about Atelerix or the round are warmly encouraged to get in touch with Alastair directly.