23 January 2019 - - UK-based biopharmaceutical company Wren Therapeutics has completed a series A financing round. The company, formally founded in 2016, raised a total of GBP 18 m from an international syndicate led by The Baupost Group with participation from LifeForce Capital and a number of high net worth individual investors, the company said.

Protein molecules form the machinery that carries out all of the executive functions in living systems.

However, proteins sometimes malfunction and become misfolded, leading to a complex chain of molecular events that can ultimately cause long lasting damage in the patient and can lead to fatality. This group of medical disorders are known as protein misfolding diseases.

Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and motor neurone diseases are widely recognised protein misfolding diseases, but others include type-2 diabetes and many rare diseases amongst the more than 50 in total.

The company has received a significant level of interest from external counterparties in its work to date and across many of the most important targets in drug discovery.

The scientific founders include Sir Chris Dobson FRS FMedSci, John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Chemical and Structural Biology at the University of Cambridge and Master of St John's College, Cambridge, and will serve as vice-chairman of the board of Wren.

It includes Michele Vendruscolo, Professor of Biophysics at the University of Cambridge, and chief scientific officer of Wren; and Tuomas Knowles, Professor of Chemistry and Physics at the University of Cambridge

Finally, the board includes Sara Linse, Professor of Molecular Protein Science and Physical Chemistry at Lund University and Member of the Nobel Prize Committee for Chemistry.

The company is based at the University of Cambridge, in the recently opened Chemistry of Health Centre, and plans on opening a satellite office in Boston, Massachusetts in the near term. Additionally, the company will announce its board of directors in the coming weeks.

Wren is a spin-off company from the University of Cambridge and Lund University (Sweden), focused on drug discovery and development for protein misfolding diseases.

Wren is advancing an entirely novel approach to address this class of diseases, based on more than a decade of research from its scientific founders focused on the chemical kinetics of the protein misfolding process.

These advances make it possible to map, and selectively modulate, the complex and non-linear chemical kinetic networks associated with misfolding proteins and disease.

Wren's predictive, quantitative platform is built on concepts from the physical sciences and is a fundamental shift from the descriptive, qualitative methods of traditional biology, which have failed to successfully address these complex systems. Wren is using its unique approach to develop a broad pipeline of small molecule and antibody therapeutics, as well as diagnostics, spanning neurology, ophthalmology and metabolic diseases.