Support for in vitro liver toxicity screening system

Funding raised

The UK company NanoBioDesign Ltd has raised £500,000 to commercialise its liver toxicity screening arrays in drug discovery. The money came from Imperial Innovations Group plc, and the Capital Fund, a £50 million UK regional development fund.

London-based NanoBioDesign’s arrays make it possible to screen new drug compounds against P450 liver enzymes in vitro. The P450 family of enzymes is the most important in the metabolism of drugs in the liver.

The high throughput screening system is based on research by the company’s co-founder and Research Director, Gianfranco Gilardi, in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Imperial College London.

According to NanoBioDesign the system will allow toxicity screening of drug candidates to be conducted faster, and with a higher degree of accuracy than is currently possible. In addition, it will be possible to test variants of P450 enzymes and study drug-drug interactions.

The company says a number of pharmaceutical companies and contract research organisations are interested in the technology and it is in discussions about co-development.

Steve Collins, co-founder and CEO of NanoBioDesign, said the financing round will allow the company to scale up its platform for industrial applications.

The system enables P450 enzymes to be attached directly to electrodes. NanoBioDesign has completed the construction, immobilisation and electrochemistry of the major liver P450 enzymes, 3A4, 2D6, 2C9, 2C19 and 2E1.

The approach adopted for the wild type enzymes has been extended to include five allelic variants of 2D6 and 2C9. Early testing with a range of substrates has shown that the system is highly reproducible and the kinetic data produced is in line with that found in the literature for membrane-bound enzymes.

NanoBioDesign completed its first round funding of £720,000, in July 2005.