Kindling Bio: Building Child-First Therapies to Transform Paediatric Cancer Treatment

With a PhD in cancer cell biology, Aleck Jones’s journey into biotech entrepreneurship began in academia, where his research spanned neuroscience, maternal health and early-life development at King’s College London. His growing focus on child health, he says, came from recognising how underrepresented it was in the broader healthcare landscape.

“That realisation hit me hard,” Jones recalls. “Child health affects a person’s entire life, yet so little is being done about it.”

That motivation aligned perfectly with an opportunity at Deep Science Ventures (DSV), where he was invited to help build a new therapeutic company focused on childhood cancers, an area long overlooked by innovation. There, Jones met co-founder Jeff Drew, and together they spent 18 months developing what would become Kindling Bio.

“We launched officially after a long period of groundwork,” he explains. “It’s been an incredible journey from concept to company.”

At the heart of Kindling Bio’s mission is a radical idea: start with children, not adults.

“Childhood cancer is incredibly important, but it’s also an area where surprisingly little innovation happens,” says Jones. “Our approach is to build a platform that begins with the biology of paediatric cancers, not as an afterthought.”

Unlike adult cancers, childhood cancers are developmental diseases rather than mutation-driven. This means they often evade immune recognition, making traditional immunotherapies less effective. Because each cancer type is rare, paediatric patients are typically treated with adult-oriented drugs, which can cause severe and lasting side effects.

Kindling Bio’s solution is deceptively simple yet transformative: create a biological “flag” that helps the immune system recognise and attack childhood tumours. “If we can make these cancers visible to immune cells and use a common flag across tumour types, we can create scalable, child-first therapies,” Jones explains.

Since officially launching in August 2025, Kindling Bio has been moving quickly. The company recently secured grant funding and is setting up new R&D facilities at the Innovation Gateway, located within the London Cancer Hub.

Over the next six months, the team will focus on generating proof-of-concept data, which will serve as the foundation for a pre-seed expansion round planned for early 2026.

“That next round will allow us to take our platform into animal models and accelerate towards the clinic,” Jones notes.

Winning the Innovation Exchange at Advanced Therapies Europe 2025 marked a pivotal moment for Kindling Bio.

“The event was beautifully organised, full of meaningful conversations and genuinely relevant people,” says Jones. “The roundtables were particularly valuable; they gave us a chance to engage deeply with others in the field.”

For Kindling Bio, the timing couldn’t have been better. The win coincided with the company’s official launch, amplifying its visibility and momentum. “People reached out directly after hearing about us at the event. It’s had a real, tangible impact,” he adds.

Kindling Bio’s roadmap is ambitious yet achievable. In the short term, the company aims to complete its proof-of-concept data and expand its funding base. Longer term, it plans to take its lead candidate into preclinical paediatric models and ultimately into clinical trials.

“Our goal is to build truly scalable, curative therapies for children and then translate that approach to adults,” says Jones. “We’re flipping the traditional model on its head: child-first, all the way.”

As Kindling Bio moves from concept to clinic, it stands at the forefront of a new era in paediatric gene and cell therapy, one where innovation starts with children, not as an afterthought.