UK's Mission Banks £60m To Develop DUB Inhibitors

UK fund manager Neil Woodford's investment trust has joined existing investors in a £60m fundraising by Mission Therapeutics, the UK drug discovery firm working to discover drugs targeting the ubiquitin pathway. The company was set up in 2011 by the management team of kuDOS Pharmaceuticals, which was bought in 2005 by AstraZeneca after it had conducted early development of the now approved ovarian cancer drug Lynparza (olaparib), an inhibitor of poly ADP ribose polymerase (PARP). Mission's scientific founder and chief scientific officer is Professor Steve Jackson, who founded KuDOS and who continues to carry out pioneering research into DNA damage repair at Cambridge University's Gurdon Institute.