KURK didn’t begin as a business. It began as a lifeline.
In a pharmaceutical-grade lab in Twickenham, the company is transforming how the body absorbs curcumin, the anti-inflammatory compound found in turmeric.
Founded by lymphoma survivors Prof Dr Harrison “Harry” Weisinger and Trent Scanlen, the biotech company spent six years developing a micelle-based delivery system that increases curcumin absorption by up to 185 times compared to standard products, solving the compound’s long-standing bioavailability problem.
The company has just secured its second consecutive Innovate UK grant, a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Swansea University Medical School, and counts actor Tom Hardy, football legend Patrice Evra and financier Jim Mellon among its investors.
Australian-born Trent Scanlen grew up as an active outdoorsman, surfing, playing rugby, living a life built around movement before a demanding corporate career took over.
He was a senior executive at Specsavers when he was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2012, a moment he describes as “having the world go silent.” Overnight, life became distilled into the things that mattered most: family, health, and survival.
When he began chemotherapy, inflammation and chronic pain defined the years that followed. Looking for something better than the painkillers he had been prescribed to feel better, Trent turned to the plant world.
Curcumin kept appearing in the scientific literature he read late at night.
What intrigued him wasn’t the hype; it was the underlying biology. In theory, it addressed exactly what his body needed. In practice it didn’t work: curcumin’s crystalline, hydrophobic structure means it passes through the body largely unabsorbed.
So he called the one person who could help him make sense of it, his closest friend and senior executive at Specsavers at the time, Dr Harry.
Dr Harry understood that battle from the inside.
From the age of 18 he had lived through Crohn’s disease, bouts of severe inflammation and, eventually, lymphoma, undergoing more than 30 hospital admissions before he turned 40.
What threatened to derail his life instead deepened his understanding of how the body heals, slowly and non-linearly, and over time he rebuilt his health piece by piece.
As a medical doctor, he brought clinical grounding to the question he and Trent kept returning to: if nature gives us something so effective, why can’t the body use it?
“We have always believed nature provides credible solutions,” said Trent Scanlen, CEO and co-founder of KURK, “but you need rigorous science to prove it.”
Throughout Trent’s time in hospital, his friendship with Dr Harry deepened, giving the two men a shared purpose.
Both had reached the same conclusion: that existing treatment options for inflammation, heavily rooted in the prescription of painkillers and non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (NSAIDs), were overused and causing more harm than good.
There was no single “aha moment,” only hundreds of quiet, determined ones: from conversations in waiting rooms, to notes scribbled after appointments, and late-night exchanges about biology and inflammation.
They ultimately became business partners, setting out to work with nature to create the exact solution they had been searching for.
Dr Harry’s medical training gave the pair a standard for what a genuine solution would need to meet, shaping the development that followed.
Trent brought the instincts of a seasoned entrepreneur, with a career built on transforming ideas into tangible results. Together they launched KURK to finish what nature started.
“Curcumin is one of the most studied natural compounds in the world, but most supplements cannot deliver it effectively,” said Prof Dr Harrison Weisinger, scientific director and co-founder of KURK.
“Our formulation was designed to solve that problem, and we are continuously working with leading research institutions to further validate the results,”
At KURK, every stage of development has been designed to solve problems of inflammation at the root, rather than masking its symptoms.
Moving beyond supplements, Dr Harry and Trent have built a delivery system engineered to specifically overcome curcumin’s natural absorption barrier.
The company’s second consecutive Innovate UK grant, a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Swansea University Medical School, led by Prof Lewis Francis, is a continuing collaboration that will track curcumin’s journey from bottle to cell and produce peer-reviewed evidence on its effects against age-related inflammation, specifically its action on the NF-κB inflammatory pathway in 3D human tissue models.
The result is a formulation where science meets nature.
Whether through the micelle-based delivery system, the clinical rigour behind its development, or the lived experiences driving it, Dr Harry and Trent at KURK are pushing the boundaries of what natural anti-inflammatory care is capable of.
They didn’t set out to build a supplement brand. They set out to build a better future for human health, starting with their own.
Image: Prof Dr Harrison Weisinger (left) and Trent Scanlen (right)
