Mission Therapeutics raises £20m

New investor Pfizer Venture Investments was joined by Mission's existing backers  Sofinnova Partners, Imperial Innovations, SR One and Roche Venture Fund. Imperial contributed £4.5m to the funding round.

The fresh capital will be used by Mission to push its small-molecule discovery programmes, which are designed for the treatment of certain cancers, into pre-clinical development.

SR One is the independent healthcare venture capital fund of GlaxoSmithKline.

Previous funding
In August 2011, Mission secured £6m in funding from Sofinnova, which led the round, as well as Imperial, SR One and Roche. Imperial contributed £1.3m in exchange for a 15.7% stake in the business.

Company
Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Cambridge, Mission has developed a deubiquitinating enzyme (DUB) drug discovery platform, Dub-Sphere, which is designed to target cancers that are difficult to treat. Deubiquitinating enzymes are a group of enzymes that separate ubiquitin (a small regulatory protein) from proteins.

The company focuses its research and discovery on the role of DUBs in DNA damage response, which the firm claims is extremely important for understanding cancer and age-related diseases.

People
Michael Moore is the executive chairman of Mission. Graziano Seghezzi is a partner at Sofinnova, while Elaine Jones is an executive director at Pfizer. Rob Woodman is Imperial's director of healthcare innovations and sits on Mission's board as a non-executive director.

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• Topics
• UK / Ireland
• Healthcare
• Early-stage
• United Kingdom
• Sofinnova Partners