History

Destiny Pharma was founded by the Chief Scientific Officer, Dr Bill Love, in 1997 to identify and generate high value pharmaceutical intellectual property. It is headquartered at the Sussex Innovation Centre at The University of Sussex in Brighton, UK.

In its infancy, the company predominantly carried out contract research for large pharmaceutical companies, including Novartis. Between its incorporation and 2003, the company worked in three main areas of research:

• Novel surfaces to improve hip implantation;
• Surface bound photodynamic agents; and
• Antimicrobial photodynamic agents.

Destiny Pharma had a major breakthrough when its innovative research created a new anti-bacterial drug platform, the XF drugs. Unlike antibiotics, XF drugs have demonstrated the remarkable quality of not generating bacterial resistance.

In September 2017, Destiny Pharma was admitted to AIM raising over £15 million and also signed a collaboration with China Medical Systems who invested a further £3 million in December 2017. In February 2018, Destiny Pharma announced that it had successfully opened its first IND in the USA, has been awarded fast-track status and was commencing the planned clinical programme. XF-73 is currently in Phase 2b trials.

In September 2020, Destiny Pharma entered into a grant funded programme in collaboration with SporeGen Limited to develop their SPOR-COV™ asset for the prevention of COVID-19.

In November 2020, Destiny Pharma  acquired the global rights to a Phase 3 ready Clostridioides difficile asset, NTCD-M3, for the prevention of C. difficile infection (CDI) recurrence. By acquiring the global rights for NTCD-M3, Destiny Pharma extends its biotherapeutics portfolio alongside the SPOR-COV COVID-19 preclinical asset.