Oxford biotech Scripta raises €10.3M to “flip the script” on drug discovery

According to EU-Startups, Oxford biotech startup Scripta Therapeutics has emerged from stealth with a €10.3 million seed round to fundamentally change how drug discovery works. The funding was jointly led by Oxford Science Enterprises and Apollo Health Ventures, with additional investment from AlbionVC, YZR Capital, and Parkwalk Advisors. Founder and CEO Peter Hamley says they’re “flipping the script on conventional target-based drug discovery” by focusing on transcription factors – the master controllers of biology. The company has brought on BioTech veteran Ray Barlow as a Non-Executive Director and is collaborating with Oxford Professor Noel Buckley. While their platform could apply to any disease, they’re starting with Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative conditions.

The biology-first approach

Here’s what makes Scripta different from traditional drug discovery. Most companies start with a specific molecular target and work backward. Scripta is basically doing the opposite – they’re looking at the entire system of transcription factors that control gene expression. These are like the master switches of cellular function, and when they go wrong, everything goes wrong. The idea is that by fixing these core controllers, you might actually stop disease progression rather than just treating symptoms. It’s ambitious, no question.

Part of a bigger European trend

Scripta’s funding isn’t happening in isolation. The article points to several other European biotech raises in 2025 that total around €51 million. TRIMTECH Therapeutics got €28.6 million for neurodegenerative treatments, Graph Therapeutics in Austria is working on AI-driven discovery, and Aerska in Ireland focuses on brain-targeted RNA therapies. So there’s clearly sustained investor appetite for platform-based approaches and neuro-focused therapeutics right now. The UK in particular seems to be establishing itself as a hub for this next-generation drug discovery work.

The computational biology edge

What’s interesting is how Scripta combines experimental biology with cutting-edge AI and informatics. They call it a “lab-in-the-loop” approach where real biological data feeds computational models that then guide further experiments. This data-rich methodology could potentially identify therapeutic candidates much faster than traditional methods. Marianne Mertens from Apollo Health Ventures acknowledged that manipulating transcription factors has “long been seen as an intractable challenge” – but that’s exactly why the computational power might make the difference here.

The long road ahead

Let’s be real – drug discovery is brutally difficult, and targeting transcription factors is particularly challenging because they’re complex and interconnected. But if Scripta can actually deliver disease-modifying therapeutics that halt or reverse conditions like Alzheimer’s? That would be transformative for millions of patients. The fact that they’re starting with neurodegeneration shows they’re going after some of medicine’s toughest problems. It’s early days, but with Oxford’s academic strength behind them and €10.3 million in the bank, they’ve got a real shot at making this biology-led approach work.