Drug discovery companies identify, validate and develop new therapeutic candidates for the prevention and treatment of disease. The sector combines biology, chemistry, data science and clinical expertise to bring new medicines from concept to clinic.
This category includes companies working on:
Browse 495 UK drug discovery companies below.
Clinical-stage company developing radioligand cancer therapies
Blue Earth Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing targeted radiopharmaceutical therapies for cancer. Its pipeline centres on prostate-specific membrane antigen-targeted radioligand therapies using both beta- and alpha-emitting radionuclides, designed to deliver high radiation doses to tumour…
AAV gene therapy platform and clinical pipeline for genetic disease
AskBio UK Ltd is the European headquarters of AskBio Inc., a fully integrated AAV gene therapy company and Bayer AG subsidiary. Operating from Roslin Innovation Centre, the Edinburgh site develops the company's synthetic promoter technology, data-driven gene expression control sequences that complement AskBio's Pro10…
Antibody therapies targeting severe autoimmune diseases
argenx UK Ltd is the UK commercial subsidiary of argenx SE, a global immunology company developing antibody-based therapies for severe autoimmune diseases. The company markets VYVGART (efgartigimod), the first approved FcRn blocker in the UK, indicated for generalised myasthenia gravis and chronic inflammatory…
Peptide immunotherapies for the treatment of food allergy
Aravax is a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing next-generation specific immunotherapies for food allergy. Its lead candidate, PVX108, is a synthetic peptide-based therapy designed to desensitise peanut-allergic patients by targeting the T cells that drive allergic responses, without triggering acute…
AI platform for pharma drug discovery workflows
DaltonTx is a technology company building adaptive AI-enabled discovery platforms for the pharmaceutical industry. Its disease- and modality-agnostic platform integrates into pharma, biotech and CRO workflows, supporting both small molecule and biologics discovery through a self-learning system that improves with…
RNAi brain shuttle platform for neurodegenerative disease drug delivery
Aerska is a biotechnology company developing RNA interference medicines to treat, delay and prevent diseases of the brain. The company's antibody oligonucleotide conjugate platform acts as a brain shuttle, enabling RNAi therapeutics to cross the blood brain barrier and reach the central nervous system through systemic…
3D immune-microtumour platform for cancer treatment selection
Pear Bio is a biotechnology company that tests cancer treatment efficacy directly on patient-derived tumour samples using three-dimensional immune-microtumour cultures and computer vision analysis. By culturing tumour biopsies with matched patient immune cells and imaging drug effects over time, the platform generates…
Novel peptide therapeutics targeting obesity and type 2 diabetes
Dia Beta Labs is a preclinical-stage biotechnology company developing first-in-class therapeutic peptides for metabolic disease. Spun out of the Diabetes Research Group at Ulster University, the company is advancing three peptide candidates that act on hormone receptors to preserve insulin-producing pancreatic…
Clinical-stage precision oncology developing first-in-class TACC3 inhibitor therapeutics
Coiled Therapeutics is a UK-listed, clinical-stage oncology company developing precision cancer therapeutics against structurally complex, previously undruggable targets. Its lead candidate, AO-252, is a first-in-class, orally administered small molecule inhibitor of TACC3 currently in Phase I trials for advanced…
Antigenic immunomodulation therapies targeting autoimmune disease
Phaim Pharma is a biotech company developing disease-modifying therapeutics for autoimmune conditions using its proprietary platform. The platform is designed to reset the immune system by reintroducing disease-specific antigenic epitopes, suppressing the autoaggressive T cell responses that underlie conditions such…
Integrated contract drug discovery from Cambridge and India
o2h is a contract research organisation operating an integrated drug discovery platform from Cambridge, UK, and Ahmedabad, India. Core services span medicinal chemistry, biology, DMPK, and non-GMP scale-up, supporting hit-to-lead optimisation through to IND-enabling studies. The company works across small molecule,…
Antibody discovery biotech targeting GPCRs in inflammatory disease
DJS Antibodies is a biotechnology company developing monoclonal antibody therapeutics against G protein-coupled receptors and other previously intractable disease targets. Its proprietary antibody discovery platform enables the generation of first-in-class antibodies against transmembrane proteins that have…
Phenotypic screening platform for targeted protein degradation drug discovery
PhoreMost is a drug discovery company developing a phenotypic screening platform to identify and prosecute previously undruggable disease targets. The platform systematically unmasks cryptic binding sites across the human proteome and links them to therapeutic functions in a live-cell context, enabling the discovery…
Clinical-stage bispecific antibody therapies for cancer and blood disease
NovalGen is a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing multi-specific biologics for oncology, haematological malignancies, and autoimmune diseases. Its proprietary platform embeds a feedback mechanism into therapeutic biologics that deactivates the drug in response to excessive immune activation, aiming to…
Targeting mitochondrial dysfunction in neurodegeneration
NRG Therapeutics is a clinical-stage neuroscience company developing small molecule inhibitors of the mitochondrial permeability transition pore as disease-modifying treatments for neurodegenerative disorders. Its lead candidate, NRG5051, entered Phase 1 clinical trials in January 2026 for ALS and Parkinson's disease.…
Multiplexed imaging platform for therapeutic mechanism of action discovery
Micrographia Bio is a biotechnology company developing a spatial proteomics platform for drug discovery. Its technology combines highly multiplexed microscopy with machine-intelligent computer vision to autonomously determine the mechanism of action of therapeutic candidates by visualising protein-protein interactions…
Preclinical neuroscience CRO for translational drug development research
Transpharmation is a preclinical neuroscience contract research organisation providing translational pharmacology services to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. The company's therapeutic expertise spans EEG, cognition, epilepsy, pain, neurodegeneration and mood disorders including treatment-resistant…
AI-driven discovery of fungal natural product therapeutics
Novogaia is a biotechnology company using machine learning and analytical chemistry to discover drug-like molecules from fungi. Its Gaia-01 model predicts molecular structures from mass spectrometry data, enabling researchers to characterise natural compounds and identify chemical starting points for drug discovery.…
Causal cellular data and AI models for drug discovery
CellCodex is a biotechnology company that generates causal data from human cells to train predictive models for drug discovery. It programmes stem cells into pure, aged, disease-relevant cell types, perturbs them at genome scale with CRISPR and compounds, and reads the outcome in single cells. The company applies the…
Personalised cancer treatment selection using in vivo drug screening
Vivan Therapeutics is a London-based biotech developing a personalised cancer therapeutics platform. The company's Personal Discovery Process sequences a patient's tumour genome, engineers those mutations into a fruit fly avatar model, and screens thousands of approved drug combinations at high throughput to identify…