Heptares Secures GBP21 Million in Series A Fund Raising to Accelerate Development of Pipeline of Small Molecules Against High-Value GPCR Dr...(o supporting the experiencedmanagement t...)

Dr David Tapolczay, CEO of Medical Research Council Technology, said: "Heptares is a prime example of the importance of MRC's long-term support for basic biomedical research and the potential for discoveries to translate into a commercial enterprise that is dedicated to producing better medicines. The fact that Heptares has attracted such a strong investor syndicate and funding round so early in its development also shows how quickly this translation of basic research into significant health benefits can be made to occur."

Notes to Editors

About Heptares Therapeutics Ltd

Heptares is a drug discovery company focused on the discovery of novel small-molecule drugs targeting G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). The Company is deploying its proprietary StaR(TM) technology principally against highly validated but currently difficult or intractable GPCR targets in several disease areas.

GPCRs are the single most important family of drug targets in the human body, but because of their inherent instability they are refractory to structural studies and in vitro screening. StaR technology enables the engineering of stabilised GPCRs, making them amenable to these vital drug discovery approaches. There are many clinically relevant GPCR targets across a wide range of therapeutic areas where discovery is advancing slowly and for which structural information, novel screening approaches and potential antibody therapeutics would greatly enhance progress.

Heptares was founded in 2007 and its StaR technology arose out of the pioneering work of Heptares' founding scientists, Richard Henderson and Chris Tate at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (Cambridge, UK) and of a wider group of MRC scientists, including Gebhard Schertler, and Ed Hulme of the National Institute for M
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