Peptone

F-Prime Capital has been an active investor in computational approaches for drug discovery since 2016.  Evaluating many companies in the sector since that time, Peptone’s approach stood out as a potential breakthrough because of its unique position at the intersection of biology and physics and because of the hard problem being addressed: how to drug disordered proteins.

Disordered proteins span several biological classes, including hormones, enzymes, growth factors, cytokines and transcription factors and their impact on human physiology and disease has become increasingly apparent in recent years. Yet the fluidity of these proteins – they lack a consistent 3D structure – has historically made drug discovery challenging.

Peptone was founded by Kamil Tamiola, Ph.D., and Matt Heberling, Ph.D. with the goal of using experimentally derived biophysical data and molecular dynamics simulations to model the behaviour of disordered targets so enabling investigation of new drug candidates.  The company has had multiple R&D collaborations with big pharmaceutical companies which have been highly productive.

In June 2022, F-Prime was delighted to co-lead a $40 million Series A financing of Peptone. The Series A funds are being used to advance the company’s tech platform, to establish a state-of-the-art research facility in Switzerland and to advance a proprietary drug discovery pipeline.