Cambridge AI drug start-up raises £33m to tackle ‘undruggable’ diseases

Dr Chris Torrance, CEO of PhoreMost

Credit: PhoreMost

A Cambridge University spin-out company which is working to create drugs to help cure cancer and other "undruggable" diseases has raised £33m in new funding amid a ‘biotech revolution’ in Britain that has been spurred by the pandemic.

PhoreMost said it had raised the money from backers including growth investor BGF as well as American-Chinese biotech firm XtalPi and Parkwalk Advisors. 

It said the latest cash would be used for its project to find therapies to cure brain tumours known as glioma.

The way its technology works is by identifying which diseases it should be targetting and then quickly working out ways on how it can develop cures and drugs to cope with them, using artificial intelligence and algorithms. 

PhoreMost claims that it is dedicated to "drugging the undruggable". The company said it was not currently looking at developing therapies for Covid-19, given "fundamentally the best treatments are going to be vaccine driven and we’re not a vaccine company". 

However, boss Dr Chris Torrance said there were certain projects it was working on where next-generation drugs may have some "coincidental" applications to help those for whom the vaccine was not able to help.

Whilst his company has not been focused on specifically finding cures to Covid-19, Dr Torrance said the company had seen the ricochet effects from the pandemic.

He said there had been a surge of interest in Britain’s biotech sector given the swathes of UK companies playing important roles in fighting Covid-19 and spurring fresh investment in the space.

Dr Torrance said: "Can the UK become a scientific superpower? The answer is yes.

"We’re at an interesting point where there’s this new model of development emerging and actually one where the UK can be a leader. We’re really starting to see how collaboration can be key, particularly in the vaccine development for Covid."

He said Britain was well positioned to help lead collaborations, given the healthcare system where the NHS was able to collate lots of information and drive collaborative projects. 

For diseases such as cancer, he said there were "hundreds of different ways of getting a care, and I think it will take many different players". "No one organisation can be expert enough to understand the full complexity of any disease, and so we need to be working together."