Manchester and London, UK, 30 March, 2015 – C4X Discovery (AIM: C4XD), a leader in rational drug discovery and design, today announced that it has won a further grant from the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK. This Smart award is the second Innovate UK grant C4XD has won recently in the area of type 2 diabetes, following our success with the Biomedical Catalyst, announced in July 2014.
The Smart award will cover C4XD’s work to validate a potential target for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. Positive results from this would justify a subsequent C4XD drug discovery programme which could lead to the creation of a new class of type 2 diabetes medicines. The American Diabetes Association estimates the annual cost of the disease to be $245bn; type 2 diabetes comprises approximately 90 per cent of the patient population.
C4XD has the only technology in the world that can generate accurate, experimentally-derived dynamic solution 3D structures of drug molecules in just a matter of days, helping to accelerate product development. Our conformational insights can be used in conjunction with existing technologies for rational drug design and can make a particularly high impact when protein crystallography is not routinely available, as is the case for GPCRs (G-protein-coupled receptors, such as orexin receptors) and ion channels.
Piers Morgan, CEO of C4XD, said “We are excited by this success. This second grant from the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK, shows their recognition of C4XD’s ability to bring our game-changing technology to play in areas which have been highly challenging for traditional drug development strategies.”