Date: 2015-04-07
Type of information: Financing round
Company: PhoreMost (UK)
Investors: Jonathan Milner (UK) Amadeus Capital (UK) Sunil Shah and Prashant Shah (O2H Ventures) (UK) Cambridge Enterprise (UK) Dr Chris Torrance (UK)
Amount: £2.5 million ($3.8 million)
Funding type: Financing round
Planned used: The funding will be used to build commercial operations based on a new drug discovery platform developed by the laboratory of Ashok Venkitaraman (Cambridge University) that can unmask cryptic drug-sites in key disease targets and pathways currently considered ‘undruggable’ by the pharmaceutical industry. Due to advances in the speed and cost of sequencing the human genome, a diverse array of potential targets to attack cancer and other complex diseases have now been defined. However, using conventional pharmaceutical approaches, the majority of these targets are therapeutically inaccessible, or undruggable, at this time. Based on PhoreMost’s proprietary ‘Protein Interference’ technology, the Company has developed ‘Site-Seeker’, a next-generation phenotypic screening platform that can identify the best new targets for drug development and, crucially, how to drug them. ‘SiteSeeker’ can define key disease impacting steps in cellular pathways, which cannot be predicted a priori, by using empirical live cell ‘phenotypic’ assays and simultaneously identify hidden druggable sites in these targets. Using ‘Site-Seeker’, PhoreMost has identified drug candidates to a novel synthetic-lethal target for KRAS, and is soliciting collaborative partners for further development.
Others: * On April 7, 2015, PhoreMost, a biopharmaceutical company focused on increasing the diversity and affordability of novel therapeutics, has been founded to identify new druggable targets for cancer and other unmet diseases. Based in Cambridge, UK, PhoreMost announced that it has successfully raised £2.5 million ($3.8 million) in Seed-funding from Cambridge-based Angels; Jonathan Milner, Amadeus Capital, Sunil Shah and Prashant Shah (O2H Ventures), Cambridge Enterprise, and Dr Chris Torrance, PhoreMost’s CEO. PhoreMost is managed by a highly experienced commercial team and supported by world-renowned experts in oncology, biochemistry and drug discovery. Dr Chris Torrance was a founder of Horizon Discovery, which completed its IPO in March 2014, raising £37.8 million of new money. Chris has significant oncology research and development experience, including six years as a senior manager at pharmaceutical company, Vernalis and 7-years as CSO of Horizon Discovery. Chris holds a PhD from East Carolina University and completed a Post-Doctoral position in the laboratory of Professor Bert Vogelstein (Johns Hopkins University), where he pioneered the use of genetically defined cell lines as cancer models in high-throughput screening and drug discovery. Ashok Venkitaraman, co-Founder of PhoreMost, is the Ursula Zoellner Professor of Cancer Research at the University of Cambridge, and the Director of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cancer Unit. He is internationally recognized for his contributions to understanding the genetics and biology of cancer, particularly in elucidating the impact of genome instability in carcinogenesis and cancer therapy. Ashok leads a multidisciplinary initiative to pioneer new approaches for drug discovery in both Cambridge and as Director of the Centre for Chemical Biology and Therapeutics at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore. Ashok has worked extensively with industry, with SAB positions in multiple Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical companies. He has been elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, London, and is a Member of the EMBO European academy, Heidelberg.
Therapeutic area: Technology - Services - Cancer - Oncology
