Brandon Capital Partners has joined with Sofinnova Partners in providing seed funding to UK-based drug discovery company Myricx Pharma.
Myricx is focussed on developing small molecule inhibitors that selectively target the human N-myristoyltransferases (NMT) in cancer.
Brandon Capital Partners and Sofinnova Partners will provide seed financing of A$8.2m (£4.5m).
Myricx is a start-up from the UK’s leading biomedical research organisations, Imperial College London and the Francis Crick Institute. It has the rights to key NMT discoveries, and composition-of-matter and use patents of its scientific co-founders through exclusive license agreements with Imperial College London.
The company is pursuing NMT inhibition in a variety of indications with an initial focus in oncology exploiting novel breakthrough discoveries that identified that inhibition of NMT results in specific cancer cell killing via an unexpected and unique mechanism.
Myricx's research is based on over 15 years of research from the laboratories of its co-founders, Professor Ed Tate (chief scientific officer), Dr Andrew Bell (chemistry Consultant) and Dr Roberto Solari (CEO).
“Dr Solari is a long serving venture partner at our firm. We were excited by the potential of Myricx in a highly exciting field of oncology research and are pleased to back him as CEO and to support the company as it commercialises its world-leading research and discoveries,” Dr Stephen Thompson, managing partner at Brandon Capital.
Professor Nick Jennings, Vice-Provost (Research and Enterprise) at Imperial, said, “With a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem, Imperial is one of the world’s best and most innovative universities due not only to the quality of our basic research but also our translation and commercialisation.
"The formation of Myricx represents the culmination of years of research drawing on funding from multiple UK and European funding sources and charities, paired with specialist support from the College’s in-house experts in patenting and commercialisation. I warmly congratulate Prof Tate and Dr Solari on their research breakthroughs, and their achievement in attracting venture funding to enable them to make a real-world impact with their research.”