New financing for project on making peptide drugs orally bioavailable
Company aims to develop a more precise understanding of the relationship between their structure and composition, and the ability to be delivered orally
Encycle Therapeutics, a Canadian start-up developing orally-bioavailable molecules, has received US$840,000 in funding from CQDM and MaRS Innovation to generate a better understanding of the chemical properties required to make orally bioavailable small peptide-like molecules, which Encycle calls nacellins. This brings total funding available to the biotech, founded by Dr Andrei Yudin of the University of Toronto in partnership with MaRS, to about $4m.
‘Encycle’s proprietary cyclised peptides are very different from other types of therapeutics and should enable us to target many of the proteins that are currently regarded as undruggable,’ says Dr Jeffrey Coull, Encycle’s president and CEO. ‘It’s easier for our peptides to cross cell membranes than it is for other types, allowing them to be taken orally and access proteins on the inside of a cell.
‘Working on this project together with Pfizer and Merck through CQDM, as well as Pfizer and GSK through MaRS Innovation, we now wish to develop a more precise understanding of the relationship between their structure and composition, and the ability to be delivered orally.’
