Outrun Therapeutics Launches With $10M Seed to Pioneer Protein Stabilisation as a New Drug Modality
April 18, 2024
Outrun Therapeutics, a University of Dundee spinout, has exited stealth mode with a $10 million seed financing round co-led by M Ventures, the strategic venture arm of Merck KGaA, and MP Healthcare Venture Management. The funding will be used to advance Outrun's proprietary drug discovery platform and progress its lead programme — a small molecule inhibitor targeting E3 ligase activity in hard-to-treat solid tumours — towards early clinical development.
Outrun was founded by CEO Dr Carolyn Porter and is scientifically led by Professor Satpal Virdee, whose laboratory at the MRC Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit at the University of Dundee is internationally recognised as one of the world's leading groups in E3 ligase biology. The company's technology emerged directly from foundational research in Virdee's lab on the biochemistry of ubiquitin — the molecular tag that cells use to mark proteins for degradation.
The central insight behind Outrun's approach is that the therapeutic community has focused almost exclusively on protein degradation as a modality — developing drugs that enhance the activity of E3 ligases to destroy disease-causing proteins. Outrun is pursuing the mirror image: inhibiting E3 ligases to stabilise critical proteins that are being inappropriately degraded in disease. Many tumour suppressor proteins, neurotrophic factors, and other therapeutically important targets are destroyed by overactive E3 ligases in cancer and neurodegeneration, and stabilising them represents a potentially powerful but underexplored treatment approach.
To discover inhibitors for these targets, Outrun has built a proprietary high-throughput platform that uses engineered protein sensors (EPS) to quantitatively characterise the specificity and selectivity of E3 ligase inhibitors with exceptional accuracy, dramatically reducing the time required to progress from target to candidate. This platform addresses one of the core technical barriers that has made E3 ligase inhibition difficult to prosecute: the challenge of measuring the detailed biochemistry of these enzymes in a scalable, reliable way.
The seed funding will enable Outrun to produce and validate its growing portfolio of E3 ligase inhibitor programmes across oncology and neurological disease indications, while positioning its lead programme for clinical entry. M Ventures investment director Dr Bauke Anninga noted that the platform's ability to rapidly assess specificity and selectivity of E3 ligase inhibitors gives Outrun a genuinely competitive edge in reducing discovery timelines.
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