A major investor is backing a UK-based startup that thinks it has found better days to find new medicines.
OMass Therapy A pipeline of drugs discovered using technology pioneered by Oxford University chemistry professor and company founder Dame Carol Robinson is advancing. The technology uses a proprietary form of native mass spectrometry to gain a clearer picture of how a drug interacts with its target in its native environment.
OMass CEO Ros Deegan said in an interview that the company now has the funds to advance its pipeline to the clinical stage, but declined to provide a specific timeline. In late April, the company raised $100 million in a Series B funding round, one of the largest ever for a UK small molecule company.New investors include Sanofi Ventures, Beitang Venture Capital and GVoriginal name Google Venturesas well as existing investors Syncona, Oxford Scientific Enterprises and Oxford University.
In total, the company has raised about $150 million, according to Deegan.
The company’s drug discovery platform, OdyssION, essentially blazes a middle ground between other discovery methods. It combines the precision of methods for examining drug targets in isolation with a broader view of the ecosystem in which those targets reside. A wider field of view often leads to lower accuracy, and isolated methods lose context, Deegan said. OdyssION can do both.
“This is a whole new approach to drug discovery,” Deegan said.
The company is developing small molecule therapeutics targeting solute carriers, complex binding proteins and G protein-coupled receptors (GCPRs), which play a role in rare diseases and immune disorders. Other startups targeting GCPR – Setner and Shoutai Pharmaceutical – Also got a nine-figure investment recently.
OMass has five drugs in preclinical development. According to Deegan, the leading three focus on the treatment of inflammatory disease, inflammatory bowel disease and congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a genetic disorder that affects 20,000 to 40,000 people in the United States and Europe.
The inflammatory disease program targets a receptor called gasdermin D, Deegan said. The receptor plays a role in a variety of common and rare diseases, and OMass alone could develop a pipeline of small molecule drugs targeting different diseases. The current goal is to better treat rare diseases, including hereditary periodic fever, such as familial Mediterranean fever, mevalonate kinase deficiency, and tumor necrosis factor receptor-associated periodic syndrome.
“Our plan is to commercialize specialty immunology and rare disease programs ourselves and collaborate with others to maximize opportunities in larger immunology indications and areas that we don’t focus on,” Deegan said.
Deegan added that OMass currently employs 40 people and expects to hire more.
The company also added new board members: Scott Biller, managing venture partner at GV; Diana Bernstein, vice president at Northpond; and Laia Crespo, partner at Sanofi Ventures.
“OMass is fundamentally changing how we identify and evaluate chemistry for the most challenging drug targets,” Bernstein said in a statement. “Native mass spectrometry uniquely allows for the simultaneous assessment of drug binding and functional effects, and OMass is a leader in this pursuit.”
OMass founder Robinson has received the 2022 Louis-Jeantet Prize in Medicine and the 2022 Benjamin Franklin Prize in Chemistry for contributions to native mass spectrometry and its applications in drug discovery.
