IP Group Plc Invests £500,000 in Biomarker Specialist Activiomics
Activiomics’ proprietary technology has broad application in the area of biomarker and drug discovery in a number of disease areas, including oncology and inflammation. Since its incorporation in February 2010, the company has demonstrated the value of its technology through revenue generating partnerships with big pharma, including GlaxoSmithKline, UCB and Genentech.
Mark Warne, Activiomics’ CEO on secondment from IP Group, said: “Better prediction of clinical outcomes is vital to improve drug approval numbers.” Pointing to recent high profile clinical trial failures, he continued “Biomarkers are a route to improving that prediction. That said, proving that new markers increase predictability in development and treatment is critical. Our technology will enable this and significantly contribute towards pharma and biotech’s efforts to gain timely approvals by regulatory authorities”.
Investors in the funding round included IP Group, IP Venture Fund, (a venture capital fund managed by IP Group) and members of Activiomics’ management. The funds raised will strengthen Activiomics’ ability to grow its partnerships with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and to pursue the identification of novel predictive and prognostic markers in oncology using its proprietary label-free technology on exclusively accessed human tissue samples. The company will have access to state of the art mass spectrometry facilities while being advised by world class scientists, including its scientific founders: world leading expert in PI3K signalling Bart Vanhaesebroeck and pioneer in the field of label free proteomics Pedro Cutillas.
For further information, please contact:
Activiomics Limited www.activiomics.com Mark Warne, CEO +44 (0) 845 5195 091 IP Group www.ipgroupplc.com Greg Smith, Group Financial Controller +44 (0) 20 7444 0050
Financial Dynamics Ben Atwell, John Dineen +44 (0) 20 7831 3113
About Activiomics
Activiomics Ltd. has developed a groundbreaking and patented technology that will enable a transformation in the way in which biomarkers are identified, diagnostics are developed and drug candidates are identified and profiled.
Activiomics’ technology centres around novel mass spectrometry based approaches for the global quantitative analysis of phosphorylation sites. Phosphorylation is critical mediator all cellular processes and hence sites of phosphorylation represent an important class of novel biomarkers. Activiomics’ TIQUAS (Targeted In-depth QUAntification of cell Signalling) technology enables the quantification of thousands of phosphorylation events from a given tissue sample and the subsequent markers of response that are identified will enable the development of future diagnostics.
Activiomics commercialises its technology by partnering directly with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies on bespoke programmes of work. In addition it is using its TIQUAS technology in combination with exclusively accessed primary breast and kidney cancer samples to generate proof of concept data and high value data packages for novel predictive and prognostic markers programmes.
About IP Group
IP Group is an intellectual property (IP) commercialisation company that specialises in commercialising university technology. Founded in 2001, IP Group listed on AIM in October 2003 and moved to the Official List in June 2006. IP Group has formed long-term partnerships with ten universities - the University of Oxford, King's College London, CNAP/University of York, the University of Leeds, the University of Bristol, the University of Surrey, the University of Southampton, Queen Mary (University of London), the University of Bath and the University of Glasgow.
For more information, please visit our website at www.ipgroupplc.com.
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