Hello Scripta!

Scripta Therapeutics’ $12 million seed round to find new disease-modifying therapeutics.

Scripta is flipping the script on drug discovery, taking a biology-first approach to discover therapeutics that modulate transcription factor activity and reprogram biology.

Combining Artificial Intelligence, imaging, and patient models to create and modulate disease maps based on transcriptional networks, Scripta is building a new biology-first paradigm to decode and undo the programs that drive disease. 

Scripta’s unique approach is based on the concept that transcription factors, the master controllers of gene expression, are core drivers of disease and act as detailed and dynamic maps of the mechanisms that underpin it.  

Through a data-rich, lab-in-the-loop combination of experimental biology with cutting-edge AI and informatics, Scripta aims to efficiently identify therapeutics that modulate these maps to restore healthy cell states.

Claire Brown, Partner at OSE and board member of Scripta, said, “We’re proud to be backing Scripta – a brilliant team that exemplifies the next generation of technology-enabled drug discovery and capitalises on the strength of the University of Oxford and the wider Oxford ecosystem.”

Marianne Mertens, Partner at Apollo Health Ventures, said, “Manipulating transcription factors in disease has long been seen as an intractable challenge, yet it holds tremendous promise for treating neurodegeneration and other life-limiting conditions. Scripta’s innovative approach could deliver transformational therapies and exemplifies one of Apollo’s key investment strategies: reprogramming diseased cells into healthy ones to tackle the root causes of age-related diseases and enable disease-modifying treatments.”

Find out more from their website https://www.scriptatherapeutics.com/ and blog https://scriptatherapeutics.substack.com/