Inaphaea continues to drive innovation in drug development through its cutting-edge work with Patient-Derived Cells (PDCs), advanced in-silico modelling, and strategic collaborations. By partnering with leading academic institutions and industry innovators, Inaphaea is enhancing predictive disease models, accelerating drug discovery, and advancing targeted therapies for cancer.
Collaborative updates
Inaphaea is delighted to confirm the completion of the second phase of Amply Discovery Limited’s service contract, announced on 19 November 2024 and receipt of a balancing payment of approximately £31,000. Following the award of a Knowledge Transfer Voucher with The Open University announced on 7 August 2025, the academic partner has been awarded a £250,000 UK Research and Innovation grant to further develop its in-silico spheroid modelling platform.
As its commercial partner, Inaphaea will supply its Patient Derived Cells for the production of spheroids and share data generated on the PDCs, including drug response profiling. Inaphaea will also evaluate the in-silico predictive models as part of its commitment to New Advanced Methodologies for drug development.
Meanwhile, Inaphaea’s parent company, ValiRx, signed an agreement with Apis Assay Technologies Ltd to evaluate APIS’s HER2 targeting Clickmer, based on APIS’s novel modified aptamer technology. Initially, for use in characterising the expression of HER2 on Inaphaea’s PDCs, the technology will also be applied to CytoLytix’s oncolytic peptide platform in order to selectively target HER2 positive cancer cells, including breast and ovarian cancer.
Digitisation of ovarian PDCs
Inaphaea is receiving weekly updates and access to PDC samples under its agreement with Nottingham Health Trust, whilst the first four ovarian PDCs from the Biobank have been successfully digitised by its partner TwinEdge BioScience. The digital avatars created from the four PDCs exceeded all quality controls, and TwinEdge will now move to phase 2 of the agreement, which involves creating digital avatars of the remaining 63 ovarian PDC models with available RNA-sequence data.
Team achievements and academic appointments
Dr Amelia Hatfield, recently promoted to Lead Scientist – Translational Science and Academic Liaison at Inaphaea, has been granted Visiting Lecturer status at King’s College London, which will facilitate the ongoing collaboration with CytoLytix. Dylon Jones, Inaphaea’s technician, has commenced a Level 6 Degree Apprenticeship in Applied Biosciences (BSc Hons) through Middlesex University and delivered via Tiro Training Ltd. Cathy Tralau-Stewart, Executive Director of the Milner Institute and Non-Executive Director of ValiRx, has been appointed as a Research Professor (Therapeutics) at the University of Cambridge.
Key reflections
Speaking about the latest updates, Mark Eccleston, CEO of ValiRx, commented: “We are very pleased to have successfully completed the first three phases of the contract with Amply and to have recognised the revenue as we continue to build the sales pipeline.
“Our partnership with The Open University is going from strength to strength with the latest pump priming award being rapidly followed by a significant grant award for our partner which will benefit Inaphaea through shared data generation and publications using our PDCs. We strongly believe that more realistic disease models provide better results and have been developing our biobank to offer a range of services based on 2D and 3D culture models under normoxia and hypoxia. These low passage, non-immortalised models, supported by extensive RNA-sequence data, are closer to, and therefore more representative of, the patient which should ultimately translate to improved understanding of the candidate drugs and reduced failures in the clinic.
“We’re excited by the potential for these models to be digitised through TwinEdge Bioscience and this collaboration has the potential to transform the way we access indicative clinical performance rapidly and economically alongside biomarker identification for patient selection for both our in house and client programs. The relationship with TwinEdge continues to grow as we expand the range of PDCs, adding to their selection of over 10,000 patient avatars. The data generated from these models is helping build more sophisticated patient avatars as the collaboration builds momentum.
“We are also really pleased to be working with APIS and to have access to their proprietary aptamer-based Clickmer technology. This is another win-win collaboration where we can help validate their HER2 targeting Clickmer whilst generating data on our PDCs. Going forward we will explore a commercial partnership to develop targeted CLX-001derivatives.
“I’d also like to offer my congratulations to Amelia and Cathy for their recent academic appointments and Dylan for starting his degree apprenticeship. It is an important part of the upskilling of our technical team.”