British bil­lion­aire Mike Platt hops on board a Lon­don start­up look­ing at drug dis­cov­ery from a dif­fer­ent an­gle

Back in 2016, up­on grad­u­at­ing with his PhD from Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don, Giuseppe Maz­za and his pro­fes­sor Mas­si­mo Pin­zani spun out En­gi­tix to un­der­stand dis­ease from a slight­ly dif­fer­ent an­gle. Now they’re ready to build out a pipeline — and they’ve piqued the in­ter­est of British bil­lion­aire hedge fund man­ag­er Mike Platt.

En­gi­tix un­veiled a $54 mil­lion Se­ries A round ear­ly Wednes­day morn­ing, on top of a new col­lab­o­ra­tion deal with Ital­ian bio­phar­ma com­pa­ny Dom­pé. The fo­cus is on the hu­man ex­tra­cel­lu­lar ma­trix (ECM) — the net­works of pro­teins and car­bo­hy­drates that pass be­tween cells, com­mu­ni­cat­ing and as­sur­ing the whole sys­tem func­tions.

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