Gates Foundation renews £2m grant for Scottish humanised-mouse firm PhaSER Biomedical

The two-year award keeps the Edinburgh company’s 8HUM model available to Gates-funded researchers working on tuberculosis, malaria and other diseases of poverty.

PhaSER Biomedical, an Edinburgh drug development company built around a genetically modified mouse that processes medicines the way people do, has secured a £2 million, two-year grant renewal from the Gates Foundation to support research into treatments for neglected diseases.

The funding extends PhaSER’s role in the foundation’s Global Health Discovery Collaboratory, a programme that gives Gates grantees around the world access to its humanised mice. The company also provides expertise in drug metabolism, pharmacokinetics, bioanalysis, computational modelling and the design of studies intended to predict how compounds will behave in patients.

The renewal matters because of a persistent weakness in early drug research. Mice break down many compounds differently from humans, so a promising molecule can fail in animal tests for reasons that would not apply in people, or appear safer or more effective than it really is. In global health programmes, which typically run on thin budgets, losing a good candidate to a mouse-specific quirk carries a high cost.

PhaSER’s answer is the 8HUM mouse, which has been humanised for the key pathways that govern how drugs are metabolised and eliminated from the body. The model was developed through a collaboration between Professor Roland Wolf at the University of Dundee, CXR Biosciences, Taconic Farms and Scottish Enterprise, and had been characterised and validated over 15 years of research before PhaSER was formed in October 2022 to commercialise it.

The new grant follows the company’s first Gates award in February 2024, worth $2.3 million, or roughly £1.8m at the time. That programme was originally announced as a three-year arrangement. According to PhaSER, investigators in the Collaboratory used the 8HUM platform during the first funding period on programmes covering tuberculosis, malaria, schistosomiasis and Chagas disease, a parasitic infection endemic in Latin America.

Professor Wolf, the company’s founder, said the past two years had shown that humanised models could produce human-relevant data that rescued promising compounds and de-risked candidates. “The renewal lets us build on our significant progress,” he said, adding that new models and capabilities would be developed with Gates grantees and the University of Dundee.

Chris Wardhaugh, the chief executive, credited the Collaboratory’s partnership structure, including close work with the Drug Discovery Unit at Dundee. “Human-relevant evidence earlier in development means better choices about which medicines to take forward,” he said.

The Gates work sits alongside a second line of business that may prove more commercially significant. PhaSER is using 8HUM to develop HERALD, short for Human Exposure and Response Analyser in Linked Drugs, an AI-driven tool designed to predict adverse reactions in patients who take several medicines at once. The project is being developed with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and the University of Dundee.

That collaboration was announced last year. In October 2025 the MHRA said its scientists would work with PhaSER and Dundee, backed with £859,650 from the government’s Regulatory Innovation Office’s AI Capability Fund, to identify harmful drug interactions using anonymised NHS data, starting with cardiovascular drugs. Predicted interactions are to be tested in laboratory systems that mimic human drug metabolism, including the 8HUM model. Lawrence Tallon, the MHRA’s chief executive, has argued that safety systems must keep pace with patients who live longer and manage multiple conditions with several medicines.

PhaSER also has commercial ties in the United States. In March 2024 it signed a ten-year agreement to supply 8HUM mice to the Sanders Tri-Institutional Therapeutic Discovery Institute, whose members are Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Rockefeller University and Weill Cornell Medicine.

The company is now expanding. It is recruiting specialists in computational modelling and artificial intelligence, and has appointed Richard Bickerton, a co-founder of the AI drug discovery company Exscientia, as a non-executive director. Exscientia was among the best-known British companies applying machine learning to drug design before its merger with Recursion in 2024.

PhaSER says its ambition is for 8HUM to become the standard mouse model in drug discovery, and that it is in discussions with investors to accelerate development. It has not disclosed the size of any planned fundraising. The company had previously secured around £970,000 from investors, a modest base for a business that now combines a philanthropic research programme, a regulatory AI project and a growing headcount.