Curve Therapeutics raises £40.5m to ‘turbocharge’ discovery platform
Pfizer Ventures led the round, with participation from Columbus Venture Partners and British Patient Capital, which join founding investor Advent Life Sciences and co-lead from the seed round, Epidarex Capital.
Simon Kerry, CEO of Curve Therapeutics, said: “This financing will enable us to expand our team, progress our lead assets into the clinic and to expand our drug discovery platform. We welcome our new investors alongside our existing strong syndicate and look forward to working together to take Curve to its next stage of growth.”
Curve’s Microcycle platform enables the direct discovery of biologically active molecules against targets that may have been difficult to address using conventional drug discovery methods.
The company has built a discovery pipeline of assets including a first-in-class dual-inhibitor of HIF-1 and HIF-2 that addresses survival mechanisms in more than half of solid tumours, and a first-in-class inhibitor of ATIC dimerization that targets an important vulnerability in multiple cancers.
The financing will enable the biotech to progress development of these assets towards clinical development and to expand the discovery platform.
Professor Ali Tavassoli, chief scientific officer of Curve Therapeutics, added: “Curve’s Microcycle platform is a powerful tool for drug discovery, enabling an unparalleled advantage in the discovery of functional hits and leads. We look forward to maximising the potential of our platform to further develop a rich pipeline of programmes with the potential to treat unmet clinical needs in a diverse range of diseases, including cancer.”
In addition, Curve’s platform allows functional screening of highly diverse, gene-encoded, Microcycle libraries within the cytoplasm of mammalian cells to identify library members that have a desired biological activity against a therapeutic target, the company added.
Dr. Marie-Claire Peakman, partner at Pfizer Ventures, commented: “We are delighted to have led this financing and to work with great co-investors and leadership team. Curve’s platform provides an exciting new approach designed to tackle tough, high priority targets which have been difficult to progress in the past. We are eager for the Company to progress the platform with the goal of identifying new therapeutics for challenging diseases.”
Curve currently occupies state of the art laboratories at the Southampton Science Park, a move prompted by the recent expansion of the company’s research team.
