AMPLY Discovery announced today that it has raised a £1.3 million seed round to develop innovative medicines using its proprietary AI-driven drug discovery platform. The round was led by Twin Path Ventures, a specialist AI investor, with participation from US-based Venture Science, Co-fund NI, the British Business Bank, and QUBIS Limited.
This hugely ambitious team is developing novel gene-silencing therapies for aggressive cancers, like triple-negative breast cancer and acute myeloid leukaemia. Additionally, as drug-resistant pathogens threaten to render our current portfolio of antibiotics ineffective, AMPLY is working on the delivery of its current preclinical drug discovery programmes to develop nebulised treatments for chronic and drug-resistant lung infections using antimicrobial peptides that can be inhaled directly into the lungs.
AMPLY was spun out of Queen’s University Belfast, a global life sciences powerhouse, to commercialise a computational platform developed in the Creevey Lab and based on over 10 years of scientific research. Founded by leading computational biology scientist Dr. Ben Thomas, Dermot Tierney and Prof Chris Creevey, the company is using this funding to accelerate the development of its discovery programmes through the preclinical stage.
AMPLY has developed a drug discovery engine that leverages the convergence of AI, Next Generation Sequencing and Synthetic Biology to accelerate the discovery of cures for diseases caused by people’s different genetic variations. The platform analyses biological molecules, identifies potential treatment targets, and bio-prints real molecules that can be quickly tested and improved in the lab. With AMPLYfolioAI the company’s scientists are decoding disease complexity, designing smarter biologic drugs, and moving to a precision process which promises to be faster, cheaper, and at a scale never before possible.
The real-world impact of AMPLY’s work addresses two of healthcare’s most urgent challenges. Whether it’s aggressive cancers or Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR), the fundamental problem is the same: existing treatments are failing too many patients because a one-size-fits-all approach does not take into account genetic diversity.
This means aggressive cancers like triple-negative breast cancer continue to have poor survival rates despite advances in treatment. Each year, bacteria’s resistance to antimicrobial drugs directly causes more than 1.27 million deaths globally and contributes to nearly 5 million more. AMPLY’s approach tackles each challenge using the same core innovation, which is designed to find effective treatments where current options are inadequate. By 2050, the economic burden of these treatment gaps could exceed trillions in healthcare costs and GDP losses globally.
While stewardship and reducing antibiotic use are important strategies, AMPLY believes these alone cannot outrun evolution, which inevitably drives resistance to treatment. The company is taking a proactive approach to this global challenge – developing new effective antimicrobials rapidly, and at a reduced cost. AMPLY is uniquely positioned in this difficult market as it is not a single-asset company but offers a comprehensive platform approach, focused both on achieving technical validation of the platform and addressing diseases with high unmet needs.
