Wren Therapeutics has cashed in £18 million from an international syndicate led by The Baupost Group, in a Series A financing round, which also included LifeForce Capital and a number of high net worth individual investors, the company said Tuesday.
One of the founders of the spin-off company from the University of Cambridge (UK) and Lund University (Sweden), who will become the permanent Chief Executive officer, Samuel Cohen, said in the company’s statement announcing the completion of the financing round: “Protein misfolding diseases are one of the most critical global healthcare challenges of the 21st century but are highly complex and challenging to address. Current strategies – in particular those driven by traditional drug discovery and biological approaches – have proven, at least to date, to be ineffective.” Commenting further Dr. Cohen stated: “Wren’s new and unique approach is instead built on concepts from the physical sciences and focuses on the chemical kinetics of the protein misfolding process, creating a predictive and quantitatively driven platform that has the potential to radically advance drug discovery in this class of diseases.”
The company also said it has received a significant level of interest from external counterparties in its work to date and across many of the most important targets in drug discovery today.
Professor Sir Chris Dobson, one of the founders of Wren, explained that Wren is built on many years of highly collaborative, uniquely integrated, interdisciplinary research that has uncovered the key molecular mechanisms associated with protein misfolding diseases. “I am hugely enthusiastic about our ability to make tangible progress against these diseases and change the course of life for millions of people around the world suffering from these debilitating and increasingly common medical disorders,” Dobson was refered to as saying in the statement.