2024 a transformational year of progress: A note from the CEO

2024 has been a transformational year for Curve.  We kicked off the year with a significant  Series A financing, raising £40.5 million from a world class syndicate which includes our existing blue chip investors Advent Life Sciences and Epidarex Capital, alongside new investment from Pfizer Ventures, Columbus Venture Partners and British Patient Capital.

The financing enabled us to expand our Leadership Team with the appointments of Simon Jones (CFO/COO), Andre Hoekema (Chair of the Board), Cora Griffin (Head of BD), Rab Prinjha (Chief R&D Officer) and, most recently, Richard Rathmell (VP Chemistry) and Rob Jepras (VP Screening). Our new team members all bring a wealth of industry experience and the drive and passion to accelerate our ambition of turbocharging the discovery platform, continuing development of our innovative therapeutic pipeline, and expanding our pharma relationships.

We are passionate about discovering and developing new ways to treat challenging diseases. With our proprietary Microcycle platform, built on 20 years of high-quality research by our CSO Professor Ali Tavassoli, we are reinventing drug discovery, by enabling high-throughput screening against therapeutic targets in the real-world setting of a live mammalian cell.

Throughout my career, I have seen many remarkable developments in drug discovery; when I started in the lab in 1984, all of pharma’s challenges were about chemistry: better molecules, meant better efficacy and fewer side effects. The rise of monoclonal antibodies, coupled with the proteomics and genomics revolution through the nineties and noughties brought about a new generation of biologic drugs that have solved many of the challenges of cell surface and extracellular targets.

However, major drug targeting challenges still remain inside the cell, with the vast majority of intracellular targets inaccessible by conventional discovery methods.

There has been a concerted effort over the last decade to try and address these challenges, including at Curve where our platform gives us an unparalleled advantage compared to current discovery methods. For example, by screening in cells for biological activity, the Microcycle platform eliminates the ‘affinity-to-activity’ hurdle of conventional methods, such as display technologies and DELs.

Our in house discovery pipeline is initially addressing valuable intracellular cancer targets and we are using the proceeds from the Series A financing to advance these programs towards the clinic.  We look forward to maximizing the potential of our platform to further develop this rich pipeline and our existing partnered programs, as well as securing further collaborations in 2025.

I would like to thank the fantastic team at Curve for their dedication and hard work this year and look forward to an exciting 2025 as we progress into the clinic to treat unmet clinical needs in a diverse range of diseases, helping patients who are largely underserved.