Vinnova, Sweden’s innovation agency, has given MucoLife Therapeutics a grant of 1 million Swedish kronor (SEK), about €91,000. The money will fund a manufacturing process for MLT-001, the company’s lead drug candidate. The inhaled drug is designed to dissolve the mucus plugs that block the airways of people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
The grant comes from a Vinnova funding round that helps small and medium-sized companies use life science research facilities. MucoLife is based in Gothenburg, Sweden, and will do the work with an unnamed contract manufacturer. These firms develop and produce drugs on behalf of other companies.
“Manufacturing is the step that turns a promising molecule into a medicine,” said chief executive Thaher Pelaseyed, who co-founded the company. “With Vinnova’s support, we can build the purification process for MLT-001 and move closer to clinical trials.”
Building A Production Process
MLT-001 is a peptide, a short chain of amino acids. The drug is still at the preclinical stage, meaning it has not yet been tested in people. MucoLife says earlier work showed that the drug can be made at larger scale.
The new project aims to reach the purity a medicine needs and to record how much usable drug each batch produces. The company also wants a written record of the process and of the quality checks at each step, so another manufacturer could take the work over. That paperwork prepares the way for production under Good Manufacturing Practice, the quality standard that medicines used in clinical trials must meet.
Mucus Plugs In COPD
COPD is a long-term lung disease that narrows the airways and makes breathing difficult. The World Health Organization ranks it as the third leading cause of death worldwide, with about 3.4 million deaths in 2023.
MucoLife says mucus plugs are found in more than half of patients with moderate to severe COPD and that no approved therapy targets them directly. The company ties the plugs to weaker lung function, more frequent flare-ups and higher death rates. Its founders have said the drug works by disrupting the interactions between mucin proteins, the building blocks of mucus.
From University Lab To Company
The company grew out of mucus research at the University of Gothenburg. Pelaseyed and co-founder Gunnar Hansson worked there with the university’s Mucin Biology Groups. The university’s commercialisation company, GU Ventures, lists MucoLife in its portfolio.
The university also ran a proof-of-concept project called MUC2GO, which received €150,000 from the European Research Council. The project ran from March 2023 to August 2024 and developed a first drug candidate. Its final report notes that a new company, MucoLife, was formed to take that work forward.
Vinnova has backed the company before. In 2025 the agency gave MucoLife SEK 300,000 for a planning project that aimed to sharpen its business model and set out a development plan through the first phase of clinical trials, covering both COPD and cystic fibrosis. This year the company also received support from Vinnova and Medtech4Health, a Swedish medical technology innovation programme, to plan a nebuliser for MLT-001. A nebuliser turns liquid medicine into a fine mist that patients breathe in.
The Vinnova grant pays for a step every drug must clear before it is tried in people. The drug has to be made reliably and to the same standard each time. For MucoLife, the new process is a step towards producing MLT-001 for its first trials in patients.
