PhaSER Biomedical, a company that develops humanised mouse models for drug development, has received a £2 million two-year grant renewal from the Gates Foundation. The grant supports the discovery of new treatments for some of the world's most neglected diseases. It continues PhaSER's role as a collaborator in the Global Health Discovery Collaboratory, which gives Gates grantees worldwide access to PhaSER's humanised models and its expertise in drug metabolism, pharmacokinetics, bioanalysis, computational modelling and translational study design.
PhaSER was formed in October 2022 to exploit a transgenic mouse model developed in a collaboration between Roland Wolf at the University of Dundee, CXR biosciences, Taconic Farms and Scottish Enterprise. The 8HUM mouse is humanised for the key pathways that govern how drugs are metabolised and eliminated from the body. This lets drug developers establish how a compound behaves in people and addresses bottlenecks in drug development programmes caused by mouse-specific metabolic issues.
The renewal builds on a £1.7 million award PhaSER received from the Gates Foundation in 2024. During that first funding period, Collaboratory investigators applied the 8HUM platform across global health programmes including tuberculosis, malaria, schistosomiasis and Chagas Disease. PhaSER is also using 8HUM to develop HERALD (Human Exposure and Response Analyser in Linked Drugs), an AI-driven drug-drug interaction analyser aimed at adverse drug reactions in patients taking multiple medicines. HERALD is being developed in partnership with the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and the University of Dundee.
PhaSER is building its team, including recruiting experts in computational modelling and AI, and has appointed Richard Bickerton, a co-founder of Exscientia, to its board as a non-executive director. Its ambition is for 8HUM to become the standard mouse model in drug discovery, and it is engaging with investors to help accelerate its development and growth.
We are really excited about the continuation of this Collaboratory programme. Over the last two years we have seen how the humanised models provide human-relevant data that can rescue promising compounds, de-risk candidates and save valuable drug development time for the treatment diseases that affect millions of people. The renewal lets us build on our significant progress, with new models and capabilities shaped in close collaboration between PhaSER, Gates Foundation grantees and the University of Dundee
The continued support from the Gates Foundation will support our work using humanised models in accelerating drug development. What makes the Gates Collaboratory work so well is partnership and we are thrilled to continue working side by side with world-class investigators, and with our colleagues at the Drug Discovery Unit at the University of Dundee, to design the right studies and turn complex data into clear decisions. This is the same philosophy that is proving so fruitful in our partnership with MHRA, involving clinicians, applied mathematicians, data analysts and pharmacokinetic scientists to combine data from our humanised models with clinical trial and real-world data, machine learning and computational modelling - true interdisciplinary teamwork. Human-relevant evidence earlier in development means better choices about which medicines to take forward, and faster progress for the people who need them most.
