Date: 2014-07-04
Type of information: Grant
Company: C4X Discovery (UK)
Investors: Biomedical Catalyst Fund (UK)
Amount: £1.48 million (€1.86 million)
Funding type: grant
Planned used: The grant will cover C4XD’s work on the feasibility of generating new drug candidates to modulate GLP-1R, a challenging small molecule drug target for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes. GLP-1R is directly involved in glycemic control and is seen as an attractive way to manage the disease. However existing GLP-1 mimetics require injection, are expensive to manufacture, and have been linked to potentially severe side effects. C4X believes its approach can identify novel drug candidates suitable for oral administration at a lower manufacturing cost. Through the use of its proprietary NMR-based approach to drug design, C4X Discovery has built a pharmacophore GLP-1R agonist \'map\' and used this to derive a small orthosteric agonist of GLP-1R. As part of the project, C4X will explore whether this molecule can form the basis of a chemical optimisation programme that will enable the creation of orally-available and cheaper alternatives to existing therapies.
Others: * On July 4, 2014, C4X Discovery, a Manchester-based company focused on optimising drug discovery and design, announced that it has won a grant from the UK’s innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board. The company was founded in 2008 as a spin-out from the University of Manchester. The company uses its NMR-based technology to solve the dynamic 3D structures of a broad range of biomolecules, including peptides, cofactors, oligonucleotides and carbohydrates. Since C4X Discovery\'s NMR technology shows what shapes active molecules prefer to adopt, it provides high-quality templates for drug discovery and design, and valuable information for drug candidate optimisation. In addition, the data is generated faster and more reliably than standard techniques such as X-ray co-crystallography or molecular modelling. C4X Discovery is using its technology in collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry and to build its own proprietary pipeline of high-value therapeutic candidates. It has been funded since inception by life science investor Aquarius Equity Partners.
Therapeutic area: Metabolic diseases
