Belfast-based Amply Discovery raises £900,000 in funding

Belfast-based biotech Amply Discovery has raised £900,000 to support the development of its platform to help tackle infectious diseases.

The money is a mix of equity and grant funding, with equity investment from Co-fund NI, the QUBIS Innovation Fund, the Helix Way Partnership, and angel investment from members of the Halo Business Angel Network. It will be used to develop new drug products using the company’s proprietary AI-powered drug discovery platform.

The Queen’s University Belfast spin-out was established in 2021 to commercialise a drug discovery platform developed by researchers in the School of Biological Science. Amply is focused on the global health threat of antimicrobial resistance and is using artificial intelligence and machine learning to discover new anti-infective products.

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“It is exciting to be able to advance the commercial development of Amply Discovery thanks to the tremendous support of our investors and Queen’s University Belfast,” said Dr Ben Thomas, chief executive and co-founder of Amply Discovery. “The development of initial research in this domain started out almost a decade ago when I considered adopting AI and machine learning techniques I had worked with in financial markets for the computational biology domain.”

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Amply is developing a new anti-infective product to tackle bovine mastitis, supported by grant funding from Innovate UK, the United Kingdom’s innovation agency.

Chief commercial officer and co-founder Dermot Tierney said the funding was a significant achievement that would allow the company to target significant commercial opportunities.