The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Science firm celebrating £1.6bn deals
ADundee University spin-out firm is celebrating deals that could be worth £1.6 billion. Life sciences firm Amphista Therapeutics creates treatments that help harness the body’s natural processes to degrade proteins that cause diseases.
In two new contracts, Amphista will use its targeted protein degradation (TPD) technology to create treatments in several disease areas.
It will receive an upfront payment and funding of up to £35.2 million from Merck Healthcare.
Success-based milestone payments could be worth a further £800m.
From Bristol Myers Squibb, it will receive an upfront payment of £24m with potential additional payments of up to £1bn.
Amphista chief executive Nicola Thompson said: “These collaborations are a validation of the progress we have made in TPD research and the potential of our EclipsysTM platform.”
The platform supports development of different treatments able to overcome limitations associated with traditional TPD approaches.
TPD uses the body’s own cellular waste disposal system to destroy diseasecausing proteins, rather than inhibiting their function.
Degrading rather than inhibiting a target protein creates a better drug response at lower doses, as well as reduced side effects and disease resistance.
The company is a spinout from the lab of Professor Alessio Ciulli at the university’s School of Life Sciences.
Amphista is now based in Motherwell and Cambridge.
Amphista founder Prof Ciulli is now director of the Centre for Targeted Protein Degradation.
The new centre will be located at the Dundee Technopole site, next to the new Tay Cities Innovation Hub.
The hub is part of plans for a Tay Cities Biomedical Cluster.
Last year, Dundee University was named one of the best in the UK for producing spin-out companies.
The city is the UK’s sixth most successful at commercialising innovation in the University Spinout Report 2021, carried out by GovGrant.
The university spawned 1.5% of the UK’s spin-outs, with these companies raising £325.7m over the past two decades.
Another Dundee Uni versity spin-off, Exscientia, was valued at around £2.5bn after its debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the US last year.
Founded by Andrew Hopkins while he was based at the university, the company uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to narrow down drug candidates.
In some cases it can cut a drug’s development time from five years to 12 months.