Cambridge, UK, 23 March 2021: o2h Ventures is delighted to announce an investment into PhoreMost Ltd, a UK-based biopharmaceutical company dedicated to Drugging the Undruggable® for the benefit of humankind. o2h Ventures* have invested in each round since its launch in March 2015 when it invested alongside Cambridge University, Jonathan Milner and Amadeus. Investors for subsequent rounds include Astellas Venture Management, BGF, Morningside, Parkwalk, Trend Investment Group, and XtalPi.
PhoreMost Ltd today announced it has completed an oversubscribed £33m ($46m) Series B investment round. The funding will be used to progress PhoreMost’s preclinical ‘Allosteric PLK1’ collaboration with Sentinel Oncology into the clinic in 2022. The programme is initially targeted towards Glioma. PhoreMost will also progress multiple additional internal first-in-class drug discovery programmes across both oncology and ageing therapeutic indications.
PhoreMost’s SITESEEKER® platform can identify the best new therapeutic targets for any chosen disease setting, and rapidly identify how to develop novel drugs to these targets. This has the potential to significantly increase the diversity of novel treatments for cancer and other unmet diseases. Significantly, PhoreMost has recently deployed SITESEEKER towards the identification of novel E3-ligands, the progression of which has the potential to be highly disruptive within the important new targeted protein degradation therapeutic modality space.
Sunil Shah, CEO of o2h Ventures, commented: “It has been an exciting journey working with the team at Phoremost for so many years. The world leading platform and collaborations that they have developed is a real credit to the passion for science and dedication of the team at Phoremost.”
Dr Chris Torrance CEO, PhoreMost, commented: “o2h Ventures have been a highly supportive investor to Phoremost; they have built a credible ecosystem to support early stage biotech therapeutic companies, this includes their drug discovery credentials, network in the biotech, pharma and investors and soon to be launched incubator in the heart of Cambridge”
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About o2h Ventures:
The o2h human health Fund is the first S/EIS fund in the UK solely focused on investing in EIS and/or SEIS seed stage companies covering novel drug discovery & AI, digital therapeutics and enabling services.
The o2h team are leaders in the biotech community and have been actively involved as investors, holding various board/industry positions as well as being engaged in grassroots scientific activity for over 20 years. o2h Ventures operates from their proprietary 2.7 acre Mill SciTech Park where they are developing a unique model for incubating small life science companies.
For more information about o2h Ventures, please visit www.o2hventures.com
About PhoreMost Ltd
PhoreMost has developed a next-generation phenotypic screening platform called SITESEEKER® that can discern the best new targets for future therapy and crucially, how to drug them, which has the potential to significantly increase the diversity and affordability of novel therapeutics for cancer and other unmet diseases.
Based on the Company’s core proprietary ‘Protein Interference’ technology, SITESEEKER® systematically unmasks cryptic druggable sites across the entire human genome and directly links them to useful therapeutic functions in a live-cell context. Using this platform, PhoreMost is building a pipeline of novel drug discovery programmes aimed at addressing a range of unmet diseases.
For more information about PhoreMost, please visit www.phoremost.com
*o2h Ventures includes The Human Health EIS Fund and the Founders of o2h Ventures
