PhoreMost Raises £33M Series B to Progress Brain Cancer Drug Into the Clinic
August 27, 2024
PhoreMost, the Cambridge-based biopharmaceutical company focused on drugging previously inaccessible disease targets, has raised £33 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round. The round was led by BGF, the UK's most active growth economy investor, and joined by new strategic investors XtalPi Inc., Astellas Venture Management, Trend Investment Group, and o2h Ventures, alongside continuing support from existing investors Parkwalk Advisors, Morningside Ventures, and Jonathan Milner. Following the round, Dr Catherine Beech assumed the Chair of PhoreMost's Board of Directors.
PhoreMost was founded in 2015 as a spinout from the University of Cambridge, growing out of research conducted in the laboratory of Professor Ashok Venkitaraman, a world authority on cancer biology. The founding team, led by CEO Dr Chris Torrance — who previously co-founded Horizon Discovery and took it public on the London Stock Exchange — built the company around a core insight: that the pharmaceutical industry was systematically missing a large class of disease-relevant proteins because they lacked obvious binding pockets that conventional drug design could exploit. These "undruggable" targets represented a vast untapped opportunity if the right technology could locate hidden sites within them.
The company's answer to this problem is its SITESEEKER platform, a next-generation phenotypic screening technology built on PhoreMost's proprietary Protein Interference approach. Rather than relying on structural prediction to find binding sites, SITESEEKER systematically uses functional screens in live cells to unmask cryptic druggable sites across the human genome and directly link them to disease-relevant functions. The result is a discovery engine that can identify high-quality therapeutic targets that would otherwise be missed, along with starting points for drugging them.
The £33 million raise will be used primarily to advance PhoreMost's lead asset — an Allosteric PLK1 inhibitor developed in collaboration with Sentinel Oncology — into clinical trials for the treatment of Glioma, a particularly difficult-to-treat form of brain cancer, within 18 months of the close. Beyond the PLK1 programme, PhoreMost will also progress multiple additional internal drug discovery programmes in oncology and ageing, building on discoveries the SITESEEKER platform has made in targeted protein degradation, a rapidly growing approach that aims to eliminate disease-causing proteins rather than simply blocking their activity.
The oversubscription of the round and the calibre of incoming investors — including Astellas Venture Management, the VC arm of major Japanese pharmaceutical company Astellas, and XtalPi, a leading AI drug discovery company — reflects both the scientific quality of PhoreMost's pipeline and the growing appetite among pharmaceutical companies to access next-generation discovery technologies through strategic investment.
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