Dundee spinout Kinetic Discovery has been picked up by its peer Exscientia in a deal consolidating the equity of Frontier IP, which held stakes in both drug discovery companies.

Kinetic Discovery, a UK-based biophysics information services spinout from University of Dundee backed by commercialisation firm Frontier IP, has been bought by a fellow Dundee spinout, drug discovery company Exscientia, for an undisclosed sum.
Frontier IP, which had held a 5% shareholding in Kinetic as well as 4.1% in Exscientia, will receive additional equity in the latter following the deal.
Founded in 2008, Kinetic Discovery provides research clients with biophysics-based drug discovery services including fragment screening, protein engineering and structural biological expertise.
Exscientia also operates a drug discovery platform, in its case partly powered by artificial intelligence, and has collaborated with Kinetic for the past two years. The company hopes to use improved discovery algorithms based on Kinetic’s data to compile its own pipeline of therapeutic assets for development.
Kinetic’s operations and employees will move from their current base in Oxfordshire to Exscientia’s newly-built facility at Oxford Science Park in the city of Oxford.
Kinetic founder and chief scientific officer Iva Navratilova, who leads experimental biophysics research at University of Dundee, will become Exscientia’s chief biophysicist.
Navratilova said: “Over the last couple of years working with Exscientia’s outstanding team, we have seen the value of an integrated service to the drug discovery process, and we look forward to building on this to create better drugs faster and more cost-effectively.”