An early investor in British technology unicorns including Deliveroo and Darktrace has agreed to fund a London-based startup pioneering a process to regenerate human tooth enamel and bone.
Sky News has learnt that Hoxton Ventures, a London-based venture capital firm, is jointly leading a $4m (£3m) seed round for Eterna Regeneratives.
The fundraising, which will be formally announced on Thursday, is also backed by The Venture Collective, another prominent early-stage investor.
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Eterna is building a regenerative biomaterials platform which it initially wants to target the $43bn global oral care market at a time of unprecedented levels of tooth decay among many adult populations.
A spinout from King’s College London, the startup was founded in 2024 by Khaled Eissa and Sherif Elsharkawy.
The company uses patented material it believes can successfully regrow damaged tooth enamel using keratin derived from sheep’s wool and which is also found in human hair and skin.
“Solving enamel loss is a major step forward to better oral health care, which frequently leads to even worse conditions and diseases,” Dr. Elsharkawy said.
“This investment will allow us to accelerate from lab-based proof of concept to real-world products at pace, and we could be in the market as early as the end of the year.”
Eterna’s belief is that enamel regeneration will provide a superior alternative to fluoride, which only temporarily strengthens a tooth’s existing enamel.
The company’s keratin-based material can be added to toothpaste, which Eterna says will enable cost-effective and enduring enamel regeneration.
“Eterna is the kind of company we like to back early: powerful, defensible science with a capital-efficient route to market,” said Hussein Kanji, partner at Hoxton Ventures.
“Its technology has the potential to transform oral care from managing enamel loss to actually repairing it, while opening the door to broader applications in tissue and bone regeneration.”
Eterna said preliminary tests had shown that the same keratin-based material could also be used to stimulate bone regeneration.
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“Eterna is looking beyond basic healing to achieve complete tissue restoration,” said Gina Kirch, founding partner at The Venture Collective.
“For too long, patients have had to settle for treatments that manage damage rather than repair it.
“Eterna is revolutionising this standard of care, harnessing its patented keratin technology to help the body regenerate itself more fully than existing options allow.”
Source: Sky News / IRN