Pharma service company wins investment

Drug discovery service provider, BioAscent Discovery, has secured £1.6m in funding from Maven Capital Partners.

The investment will allow the growth of BioAscent’s offering of integrated drug discovery, and compound management services, as well as the Compound Cloud library of lead-like pharma compounds.

Paul Smith, CEO at BioAscent, said: “Smaller companies want to avoid building a costly drug discovery capability, while larger pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies want the increased cost-effectiveness, flexibility and efficiency compared to developing in-house infrastructure and research staff. With our experienced teams, established compound management and screening facilities, and our on-site Compound Cloud library, we can work with clients right from the earliest stages of the drug discovery process, and this gives us a stand-out advantage over other providers”.

As well as having the infrastructure to house client libraries ranging in size from a few thousand to millions of compounds, the BioAscent laboratories are equipped with state-of-the-art drug discovery instrumentation. This includes 400MHz NMR, LCMS, super-critical fluid chromatography and HPLC, and the team can perform a broad range of synthetic procedures including microwave-assisted reactions, hydrogenation and flow chemistry.

David Milroy, Investment Director at Maven, said: “Maven’s investment will be used to expand BioAscent’s service offering and critically hire additional leading scientists and I very much looking forward to working with Paul’s team and with BioCity to scale the business.”