Two-year-old Heptares Therapeutics raised $30.6 million in a Series A that will fund new research on drugs targeting G-protein-coupled receptors. Clarus Ventures led the syndicate for the UK biotech. MVM Life Science Partners and the Novartis Option Fund also joined in, with all three investors contributing equally.
Heptares is a platform company, looking to create a pipeline of experimental therapies using its own technology. The developer says it will advance its own drugs targeted against currently intractable GPCRs and expects to ink R&D pacts with other biopharma companies as well.
GPCRs are the site of action of 25 percent to 30 percent of current drugs, says Heptares. "However, these membrane proteins are notoriously difficult to isolate from cells in an intact and active form and this has severely restricted efforts to study GPCRs using modern drug discovery techniques. Heptares' StaR (Stabilised Receptor) technology platform enables the company to overcome this technology hurdle by engineering and purifying GPCRs in stable and functional conformations that retain their drug-binding characteristics."
CEO Malcolm Weir, a veteran scientist who spent 17 years at Glaxo, tells FierceBiotech that the venture money will finance operations for the next three to four years. The developer currently has a staff of 15 and plans to outsource much of its work.
"Over the next year or so we'll roughly double in size," he adds. "Our approach is to have a core technology team and also core pharmacology and medicinal chemistry teams as well and use them to supervise a lot of our outsourced work."
- check out the Heptares release
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