Aquapharm closes £4.2M round, appoints Simon Best as CEO

Funding

The marine biotechnology company, Aquapharm Biodiscovery, has closed a £4.2 million round of funding from the existing investors Aescap Venture, Tate & Lyle Ventures, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and NESTA and announced the appointment of biotech veteran Simon Best as CEO.

The founder and current CEO Andrew Mearns Spragg will take up the role of Chief Technical Officer.  

The money will be used towards the further development and commercialisation of Aquapharm’s portfolio of products generated from its collection of over 7,250 marine micro-organisms.

Natural products from this source of new biological and chemical diversity are already being exploited commercially with major partners such as Croda Plc, which provides ingredients for the cosmetics industry, and the Indian pharmaceutical company Dr Reddy’s Laboratories. A collaboration to use the products in food is being negotiated.

Over the next year, Aquapharm, based in Oban, Scotland, will also use the new funding to build a marine-derived compound library containing small molecule and peptide compounds with the size and structural characteristics of potential new drugs. Upon its completion, the compound library will accelerate Aquapharm’s drug discovery efforts, principally in the anti-microbial field. The company will also build on existing interest from pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to enter into discovery and development alliances.

Aquapharm has built a substantial and specialised collection of marine bacteria and fungi from diverse habitats, to which it has applied proprietary technologies to stimulate the production of novel, biologically active products with broad chemical diversity.