Revolver Therapeutics, a University of Bath spin-out developing a new class of cancer therapeutics that target ‘undruggable’ transcription factors, has secured a further £572k funding round led by QantX, with follow-on investment from the UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund (UKI2S) (managed by Future Planet Capital), as well as from the University of Bath.

The funding supports a novel approach to treating colorectal cancers by shutting down transcription factors, which have been considered to be ‘undruggable’. Transcription factors act like master regulators of disease inside cells, controlling which genes are turned on or off.

In cancer, they can drive tumour growth, survival and resistance to treatment. But they have been notoriously hard to target with conventional drugs: they sit deep inside the cell’s nucleus and lack the ‘binding pockets’ that conventional small molecules typically dock into.

Revolver’s treatments are built around specially designed peptides – small, protein-like molecules – discovered using its proprietary Transcription Block Survival platform, a technology spun out of the University of Bath. The platform finds peptides that can get inside cells and switch off these previously unreachable targets, overcoming a long-standing barrier that has held back this kind of therapy.

The new funding will allow Revolver to develop both its platform and its pipeline of new treatments for colorectal cancer with unmet medical needs.