New Investments to Advance Drug Discovery

Arctoris Ltd, a fully automated drug discovery platform for virtual and traditional biotechnology companies, pharmaceutical corporations and academia, today announced that it has successfully closed a seed funding round of £3.2 million to advance its novel drug discovery offering. The funding will be used to further build out the company’s commercial operations and service portfolio, the latter of which enables customers to rapidly and accurately achieve drug discovery milestones from target identification to candidate characterization, as well as dataset generation for artificial intelligence (AI/ML) model validation and training.

From its beginnings at the University of Oxford in 2016, Arctoris has established the world’s first fully automated, robotic laboratory dedicated to drug discovery, providing global drug discovery teams with on-demand access to a broad range of cellular, molecular and biochemical assays. The company’s automated system delivers high-quality data through standardized, pre-optimised and fully validated processes, while its innovative online portal makes it easy for researchers to plan, order and track their experiments from anywhere in the world.

"At RT Partners, we invest in UK-based, IP-rich technology that has the potential to revolutionize the life science industry. Arctoris’s novel platform and compelling vision is perfectly aligned with this objective. The successful completion of this seed funding round will support the company’s clear potential to improve how drug discovery is planned and performed," said Alex Gough, Partner, RT Partners.

Martin-Immanuel Bittner MD DPhil, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Arctoris, commented: "This support from industry-recognized investors and advisors will enable our team to continue to develop our revolutionary approach to drug discovery, which has been specifically designed to produce data of the highest possible quality from a broad range of biochemical, molecular biology and cell biology assays. Through our platform, scientists and biotechnology entrepreneurs worldwide can make discoveries faster and more efficiently, paving the way to introducing new treatments to patients sooner."

"At a practical level, this funding will enable us to further advance our technology, expand our service offering, attract more leading experts to join our thriving team and support the imminent opening of our new, bespoke laboratory facility. It will also allow us to continue to be closely involved in BioTarget, the world’s first biotech competition for emerging companies dedicated to finding new molecules for cancer treatment," said Tom Fleming MChem, Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder of Arctoris.