Manchester and London, UK, 4 July, 2014 – C4X Discovery (C4XD), a leader in rational drug discovery and design, today announced that it has won a grant from the UK’s innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board.
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. It can be used in conjunction with existing technologies for structure-based drug design, and can make a particularly high impact when protein crystallography is not routinely available, as is the case for GPCRs and ion channels.
The grant by the UK’s innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board is from the BioCatalyst Fund and will cover C4XD’s work on the feasibility of generating new drug candidates to modulate GLP-1R, a challenging small molecule drug target for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes. The American Diabetes Association estimates the annual cost of the disease to be $245bn; type 2 diabetes comprises approximately 90 per cent of people with diabetes, and less than a third of these patients achieve proper control of their glycemia levels with standard non-injectable therapies, leading to further health complications. GLP-1R is directly involved in glycemic control and is seen as an attractive way to manage the disease. However existing GLP-1R drugs require injection, are expensive to manufacture, and have been linked to potentially severe side effects. C4X believes its approach can identify novel drug candidates suitable for oral administration at a lower manufacturing cost.
Piers Morgan, CEO of C4XD, said “We are excited by this success. A grant from the prestigious Technology Strategy Board’s BioCatalyst Fund reflects their recognition of the potential of C4XD’s technology and our ability to innovate in areas which have proved highly challenging using traditional drug development strategies.”