AMPLY Discovery Limited has announced that it has raised £900,000 in a mix of equity and grant funding to develop new drug products using its proprietary AI-driven drug discovery platform.
The Belfast-based biotech company, which is a spin-out from the Queen’s University Belfast, was established in 2021 to commercialise an innovative drug discovery platform which was developed by researchers in the School of Biological Science at Queen’s. Its technology platform has been the subject of more than eight years of scientific research.
AMPLY Discovery is focused on helping to solve the challenges created by the global health threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which threatens to render mankind's current ineffective portfolio of antibiotics to fight infections caused by bacteria, viruses and fungi. Its team is using AI and machine-learning techniques to discover new anti-infective products.
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The company’s initial flag-ship programme is developing a new anti-infective product to tackle bovine mastitis and has received grant funding from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency under its ICURE Aid for Start Ups programme.
The company has raised further funding to support its development programmes through equity investment from Co-fund NI, which is managed by Clarendon Fund Managers and supported by Invest NI and the British Business Bank, the QUBIS Innovation Fund, the Helix Way Partnership, and angel investment from members of the Halo Business Angel Network (HBAN).
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Dr Ben Thomas, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder said: “It is exciting to be able to advance the commercial development of AMPLY Discovery thanks to the tremendous support of our investors and Queen’s University Belfast. The development of initial research in this domain started out almost a decade ago when I considered adopting AI and machine learning techniques I had worked with in financial markets for the computational biology domain.”
Anne Dornan, Entrepreneurial Networks Manager at QUBIS added: “AMPLY Discovery is a fantastic example of the support Queen’s can offer our researchers though our investment arm, QUBIS Limited. The AMPLY team has moved through our entire gambit of support including the Lean Launch and ICURe programmes.”
Source: Written from press release.
