2020 news accelerate pharmenable 883x432 1

Investing in Cambridge drug discovery

4 August 2020

The article at a glance

PharmEnable raises £1.8 million for drug discovery expansion. PharmEnable, a venture supported by the Accelerate Cambridge programme at the Entrepreneurship Centre of …

PharmEnable raises £1.8 million for drug discovery expansion.

Petri dish.

PharmEnable, a venture supported by the Accelerate Cambridge programme at the Entrepreneurship Centre of Cambridge Judge Business School, said it has secured £1.8 million in a seed financing round led by Cambridge Enterprise and the University of Cambridge Enterprise Fund VI, managed by Parkwalk Advisors.

Pharmenable team
Pharmenable team

The Cambridge drug discovery company, a spinout from the University of Cambridge, is using advanced medicinal chemistry and artificial intelligence-enabled approaches to design the next generation of highly complex and specific drug candidate molecules.

PharmEnable, founded in 2016, was financed to date by its founders and service-based revenues. It will use the new funding to evolve its business model and invest in a pipeline of drug discovery programmes across a number of disease areas including cancer and neurodegenerative disease. The firm plans to continue engaging in strategic partnerships with pharma, innovative biotechs and academia.

PharmEnable CEO Dr Hannah Sore said: “We are pleased to welcome on board our new investors and appreciate their confidence in our business. Our aim is to replicate the specificity of biologics in the powerful and scalable form of a small molecule, to treat devastating diseases where there are currently no treatment options.

“We have proven the strength of our platform in tapping unexplored parts of the chemical universe to find novel and specific hits for currently undruggable targets, and are excited to now be able to invest in our own pipeline of drug discovery programmes, as well as to develop further strategic partnerships.”