NEW YORK — Bactobio, a UK-based antimicrobial discover company, said on Monday that it has raised £6 million ($7.3 million) through an oversubscribed bridge financing round.
The round was led by Bridford Group with participation from angel investors Peder Holk Nielsen and Hugh Grant, as well as new investors.
Bactobio said it will use the funding to advance its bacteria-based compound discovery pipeline, which combines synthetic biology, next-generation sequencing, and machine learning to enable the characterization of next-generation antimicrobials.
"It is estimated that fewer than 3 percent of the potential natural products encoded in nature have been identified to date," Bactobio CSO Mark Wilkinson said in a statement. "Bactobio's bioactivity-driven but target-agnostic approach lets nature do the work and lead us towards compounds which have been unimaginable and previously inaccessible to drug-discovery efforts. Funds from this round will allow us to dig deeper into this previously untapped bioresource."