Manchester and London, UK, 4 July, 2014 – C4X Discovery (C4XD), a leader in rational drug discovery and design, today announced that it has won a grant from the UK’s innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board. C4XD has the only technology in the world that can generate accurate, experimentally-derived dynamic solution 3D structures of drug molecules in just a matter of days. It can be used in conjunction with existing technologies for structure-based drug design, and can make a particularly high impact when protein crystallography is not routinely available, as is the case for GPCRs and ion channels.
The grant by the UK’s innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board is from the BioCatalyst Fund and will cover C4XD’s work on the feasibility of generating new drug candidates to modulate GLP-1R, a challenging small molecule drug target for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes. The American Diabetes Association estimates the annual cost of the disease to be $245bn; type 2 diabetes comprises approximately 90 per cent of people with diabetes, and less than a third of these patients achieve proper control of their glycemia levels with standard non-injectable therapies, leading to further health complications. GLP-1R is directly involved in glycemic control and is seen as an attractive way to manage the disease. However existing GLP-1R drugs require injection, are expensive to manufacture, and have been linked to potentially severe side effects. C4X believes its approach can identify novel drug candidates suitable for oral administration at a lower manufacturing cost.
Piers Morgan, CEO of C4XD, said “We are excited by this success. A grant from the prestigious Technology Strategy Board’s BioCatalyst Fund reflects their recognition of the potential of C4XD’s technology and our ability to innovate in areas which have proved highly challenging using traditional drug development strategies.”
For further information please contact:
C4X Discovery Ltd
Piers Morgan, CEO
07912 293832
Ben Atwell / John Dineen, FTI
020 3727 1136
comms@c4xdiscovery.com
About C4X Discovery Ltd
C4X Discovery is a Manchester-based company focused on optimising drug discovery and design. It was founded in 2008 as a spin-out from the University of Manchester. The company uses its NMR-based technology to solve the dynamic 3D structures of a broad range of biomolecules, including peptides, cofactors, oligonucleotides and carbohydrates. Since C4X Discovery’s NMR technology shows what shapes active molecules prefer to adopt, it provides high-quality templates for drug discovery and design, and valuable information for drug candidate optimisation. In addition, the data is generated faster and more reliably than standard techniques such as X-ray co-crystallography or molecular modelling. C4X Discovery is using its technology in collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry and to build its own proprietary pipeline of high-value therapeutic candidates. It has been funded since inception by life science investor Aquarius Equity Partners. www.c4xdiscovery.com .
About the Technology Strategy Board
The Technology Strategy Board is the UK’s innovation agency. Its goal is to accelerate economic growth by stimulating and supporting business-led innovation. Sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the Technology Strategy Board brings together business, research and the public sector, supporting and accelerating the development of innovative products and services to meet market needs, tackle major societal challenges and help build the future economy. For more information please visit www.innovateuk.org. Catalysts are run jointly by the Technology Strategy Board and the Research Councils. A Catalyst is a form of research and development funding which focuses on a specific priority area and aims to help take projects from research to as close to commercial viability as possible. The Catalyst model supports projects in priority areas where the UK research base has a leading position and where there is clear commercial potential. Current Catalysts include: Biomedical Catalyst, Agri-tech Catalyst and the Industrial Biotechnology Catalyst. For more details please visit: https://www.innovateuk.org/-/catalysts
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