The tech­nol­o­gy used to de­tect ex­plo­sives at air­ports — mass spec­trom­e­try — is be­ing pi­lot­ed as an en­gine for drug dis­cov­ery.

Mass spec­trom­e­try is a tool de­signed to mea­sure with pro­found ac­cu­ra­cy the mass of a sin­gle mol­e­cule. Typ­i­cal­ly, mass spec­trom­e­ters can be used to iden­ti­fy un­known com­pounds, to quan­ti­fy known com­pounds, and to de­ter­mine the struc­ture and chem­i­cal prop­er­ties of mol­e­cules.

Us­ing this in­for­ma­tion to de­vel­op drugs, ver­sus us­ing tra­di­tion­al cell-based as­says is an ap­proach pi­o­neered by Car­ol Robin­son, the first fe­male pro­fes­sor of chem­istry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ox­ford. Along­side her for­mer stu­dents, Robin­son found­ed OMass Ther­a­peu­tics to move it for­ward in the field of mem­brane tar­gets, in­clud­ing GPCRs.

Ros Dee­gan

On Mon­day, the Ox­ford spin­off un­veiled £27.5 mil­lion in ad­di­tion­al Se­ries A fi­nanc­ing from Syn­cona, Ox­ford Sci­ences In­no­va­tion (OSI), and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ox­ford, bring­ing its to­tal haul to £41.5 mil­lion.

“It’s drug dis­cov­ery in high de­f­i­n­i­tion…it’s all about re­veal­ing the pic­ture with high­er res­o­lu­tion. And it’s about high con­tent da­ta. The rea­son mass spec­trom­e­try is in­ter­est­ing in drug dis­cov­ery is that the con­tent that you get from the da­ta is much high­er res­o­lu­tion than through a cell-based as­say,” OMass chief Ros Dee­gan told End­points News.

“So in a cell-based as­say, you’re ef­fec­tive­ly an­swer­ing on­ly the ques­tion that you asked, where­as, in na­tive mass spec­trom­e­try, it’s a bio­phys­i­cal ap­proach.”

The ma­jor­i­ty of ex­ist­ing ther­a­peu­tics tar­get mem­brane pro­tein — ac­ces­si­ble on the sur­face of cells — to mod­i­fy cel­lu­lar sig­nal­ing. In con­trast to tra­di­tion­al cell-based as­says, the mass spec­trom­e­try ap­proach of­fers ‘high de­f­i­n­i­tion’ in­sight in­to un­der­stand­ing mem­brane pro­tein bi­ol­o­gy, Dee­gan not­ed.

The plat­form pro­vides ac­cess to dif­fer­ent chem­i­cal start­ing points be­cause bio­phys­i­cal ap­proach­es tend to point to­ward dif­fer­ent chem­istry — as they are not bi­ased to spe­cif­ic types of chem­istry through the use of cell-based as­says, she said. “Cell-based as­says tend to put you in lipophilic, quite of­ten large lipophilic com­pounds.”

If the ap­proach is shown to work, it could serve to short­en drug dis­cov­ery time­frames.

“Ul­ti­mate­ly the com­pa­ny aims to use high de­f­i­n­i­tion tech­nolo­gies to ef­fi­cient­ly ac­cess can­di­dates with a greater PoS (prob­a­bil­i­ty of suc­cess) in high-val­ue ar­eas, there­fore sig­nif­i­cant­ly short­en­ing the drug dis­cov­ery time­line for small mol­e­cules,” said Lach­lan MacK­in­non, prin­ci­pal at OSI in an email to End­points.

OMass in­tends to not just iden­ti­fy mol­e­cules of in­ter­est but to take them through to the mar­ket them­selves. It has three pro­grams at the mo­ment — al­though they are far from be­ing ready for the clin­ic.

The cap­i­tal in­jec­tion will give OMass — which is fo­cus­ing on im­munol­o­gy and ge­net­i­cal­ly de­fined dis­eases out­side of im­munol­o­gy — just over two years of run­way and will be used to shep­herd its lead pro­gram in­to pre­clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment.

89bio said its drug was better than placebo at lessening fibrosis without worsening nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, or NASH, in two of three dose groups.

The San Francisco biotech said it thinks the Phase IIb data pave the way for a potential Phase III, following in the footsteps of another biotech in its drug class, Akero Therapeutics. To fund a late-stage study, CEO Rohan Palekar told Endpoints News 89bio “would need to raise additional capital,” with the company having about $188 million at the end of last year.