UK Government Co-Funds £69.4m Spend on AI-Led Drug Discovery and Development
Most of the headlines around the AI Action Summit in Paris earlier this week solely focused on the UK and the US’s failure to sign a declaration supporting inclusive, sustainable and ethical uses of AI. This has made the UK’s government announcement go unnoticed; in which they decided to co-fund three AI companies, with the investment amounted to £82.6m.
The muted public response is bound to have been a blow to a government which is keen to be seen as leading the charge to position the UK as a European centre for excellence in AI.
Limited news coverage aside, £69.4m of the £82.6m investment was earmarked for two projects using AI to advance treatments and diagnostics for cancer.
The funding was awarded as part of the Research Venture Catalyst (RVC) programme run by the UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. The UK government contributed £31.8m of the £69.4m, with the remaining £37.6m coming from non-government sources including GSK, Microsoft, and Breast Cancer Now, amongst other businesses and charities.
The Lucky Ones: PharosAI and Bind Research
One of the beneficiaries was PharosAI, a coalition of researchers from academia and the NHS, including King’s College London, as well as Guy’s and St Thomas’s health trusts.
PharosAI is set to receive the lion’s share of the funding, netting £43.6m, made up of £18.9m from government funding and £24.7m from co-investment. The London-based company is working on molecular profiling and digitizing tissue samples donated from NHS research biobanks, the Breast Cancer Now Biobank, and King’s Health Partners Cancer Biobank – with the aim of creating a broad spectrum of cancer-related datasets to train AI models.
Hopes of drugging the undruggable, secured Bind Research £25.8m, split evenly between government funding and co-investment. Bind, which has the support of Eric Schmidt, the former CEO and Chairman of Google, is the UK’s first not-for-profit focused research organisation.
Bind Research is building datasets of disordered protein-drug interactions. While AI tools like AlphaFold have advanced the understanding of structured proteins, there is still a lack of work being done on disordered proteins.
Disordered proteins play a crucial role in cellular signalling and regulation. However, their dynamic nature allows them to constantly shift between shapes, making target identification difficult, which is why they are termed ‘undruggable’.
Bind is hoping to use its proprietary datasets to not only train AI models to transform disordered proteins into viable drug targets but also speed up the drug discovery process.
Bridging the Funding Gap
Both Bind and PharosAI had already netted £70,000 and £100,000 respectively last year in seed funding as part of the RVC programme.
This latest initiative by the RVC should help both groups get through the infamous “valley of death”, a crucial point in the lifecycle of a start-up, when companies often find it hard to source more capital after seed funding has run out. This gap in finances is often the point where many small biotechs fail.
In terms of the amount of support received from the RVC, it compares favourably to some of the larger venture capital rounds given to other UK AI drug discovery groups. In March 2024, Relation Therapeutics received $35m (£28m) from large venture capital funding to advance its work in osteoporosis and osteoarthritis.
While last May fellow London-based AI group LabGenius landed £35m in a series B round to help fund the development of its machine-learning-driven drug discovery platform and move its pipeline of multi-specific antibodies for solid tumours towards the clinic.
Eyes on the AI Prize
Continuing its focus on AI, on Thursday, the UK government announced a smaller £4m fellowship programme to examine AI’s impact on science and how governments should respond to ensure AI-driven science remains rigorous and delivers reliable outcomes.
The UK programme is set to run alongside a similar US-based research programme funded by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, creating a transatlantic research effort.