Magnitude Biosciences, a life sciences company spun out of Durham University, has raised £1.3 million to scale its drug discovery platform and expand its work with pharmaceutical companies.

The company has developed VivoScan, a high throughput screening platform that uses C. elegans nematode worms to test potential drug candidates within a whole organism. The platform combines the worms with imaging, machine learning, artificial intelligence, automation and robotics to generate biological data on how potential treatments behave.

According to the company, this approach allows pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms to screen drug candidates more quickly and cheaply than through conventional methods. The initial focus for the technology is on ageing, longevity and neurodegenerative diseases, areas where whole organism testing can offer insights that isolated cell based methods may miss.

The funding round was led by Northstar Ventures, which invested through the North East Spinout Inspire Fund, the North East Innovation Fund and the Northstar EIS Growth Fund. Maven managed regional funds also took part, including NPIF II, Maven Equity Finance and the Finance Durham Fund, alongside a number of new angel investors. The investment will additionally allow Magnitude Biosciences to access a further £217,000 through the Innovate UK Investor Partnership grant.

The company said it plans to use the new capital to expand VivoScan, increase its commercial activity with global pharmaceutical companies, invest in equipment and automation, and recruit additional staff. Its longer term ambition is for VivoScan to be capable of screening millions of compounds using whole organism models, a scale not currently matched by comparable platforms on the market.

Dr Fozia Saleem, chief executive of Magnitude Biosciences, said the company's ambition was to become the first to offer a platform capable of screening millions of compounds within a whole organism. She said the investment in VivoScan gave the company the opportunity to turn that ambition into reality, and described it as an opportunity to change the scale and speed at which drug discovery can be carried out. She added that the platform was designed to go beyond simply increasing the number of compounds screened, generating rich, whole organism biological data that could help researchers understand how potential therapies affect health, ageing and disease.

The investment arrives at a time when the pharmaceutical industry more broadly is seeking alternatives to traditional mammalian testing, partly in an effort to reduce the time and cost associated with identifying viable drug candidates. Whole organism platforms such as VivoScan represent one strand of this wider shift, offering a potential middle ground between simple cell based assays and full scale animal trials.

Magnitude Biosciences was spun out of Durham University and now operates as a contract research organisation, providing drug discovery services directly to pharmaceutical and biotechnology businesses. This positions the company within the growing ecosystem of university linked life sciences firms in the North East of England.

The North East Spinout Inspire Fund, one of the participants in this funding round, is a £22.5 million fund backed by Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, Sunderland and Teesside universities, together with the North East Mayoral Strategic Authority. It was established specifically to invest in companies commercialising research originating from universities across the region, reflecting a coordinated regional effort to support the transition of academic research into viable businesses.

Dr Will Cousins, investment manager at Northstar Ventures, said his firm had worked closely with Magnitude Biosciences throughout its development and had seen firsthand the strength of its team, technology and future opportunities. He said Northstar was proud to continue backing a business helping to shape the future of drug discovery.

Sarah Newbould, senior investment manager at the British Business Bank, said the bank remained committed to supporting businesses driving innovation across the UK economy, adding that this latest funding round would help bring Magnitude Biosciences' technology to market.

The funding underscores continued investor interest in university spinouts working at the intersection of biology and advanced computing, particularly where new technologies promise to reduce the cost and timeline associated with early stage drug discovery.

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