Myricx Bio: from an antimalarial to a £90m Imperial spinout – with Professor Tate
Founding Myricx Bio: from a novel antimalarial to a £90m Imperial spinout.
Professor Edward Tate - Founder & SAB, Myricx Bio; Satellite Group Leader, Francis Crick Institute; GSK Chair in Chemical Biology, Imperial College London.
This Fireside Chat covered a journey spanning more than a decade of research undertaken by a diverse team of academic and industrial scientists, taking inhibitors of the lipid transferase N-myristoyltransferase (NMT) as the common thread. Starting with the first high-throughput screens against this target in malaria parasites, the team travelled via potent antimalarials to host-targeted pan-antiviral agents, and ultimately established a new class of anticancer agents.
The latter work led to the formation of the biotech company Myricx Bio, and their recent disclosure of "ultrapotent" NMT inhibitors as a unique class of next generation payloads for antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs).
ADCs are one of the most exciting and rapidly growing classes of therapeutics, particularly for cancer, with a market size set to grow to >$30 billion over the next 5 years. NMT inhibitors offer a mode of action distinct from all current ADC payloads and eradicate solid tumours in animal models across a range of common cancer-associated antigens, including those resistant to current "best-in-class" clinical ADCs.
Event image above courtesy Myricx: In an ADC the drug payload (light blue) is connected by linkers (dark blue) to the mass of the antibody.
Professor Tate holds the GSK Chair in Chemical Biology at Imperial College London, and he is a Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute. Following his PhD (2000) with Steve Ley in Cambridge and postdoctoral research in Paris as an 1851 Fellow and Howard Trust Fellow, he was awarded a BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship in 2006 to start his group at Imperial College.
He sits on the advisory boards of several international research institutes and biotechs, and develops new drug discovery technologies with companies including Pfizer, GSK and AstraZeneca.
His research has been recognised by awards and Fellowships, most recently the 2019 Sir David Cooksey Translation Prize, the 2020 Corday-Morgan Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), a 2022 Cancer Research UK Programme Award, and the 2024 RSC Horizon Prize. In 2023 he was appointed to the GSK Endowed Chair in Chemical Biology at Imperial College. Ed is also academic founder of several companies developing his lab’s research toward clinical applications, including Myricx Bio which in July 2024 raised $114 million in Series A investment, thought to be the largest ever for a UK biotech spinout.
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