Meet Anocis: Building a new generation of safer pain and itch treatments

We are excited to announce Zinc’s investment in Anocis Therapeutics Ltd, a UK biotech developing a new generation of medicines for the treatment of pain and itch that are designed to offer meaningful relief without the risks and limitations of many current therapies.

Few areas of medicine are as universal and as persistent as pain. Whether caused by nerve damage, chronic illness, inflammatory disease or cancer, pain affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Yet despite decades of research, treatment options remain limited. For many patients with severe or chronic symptoms, the most effective medicines still come with serious trade-offs: addiction risk, debilitating side effects, poor tolerability, or simply not enough efficacy.

Chronic itch presents a similar challenge. Conditions such as eczema, psoriasis and age-related chronic itch can be profoundly disruptive, affecting sleep, mental health and quality of life for millions of people. Many of these conditions are driven by immune and inflammatory pathways, an area of growing scientific and commercial focus across biotech and pharma. Yet despite this rising interest, many patients still cycle through therapies that only partially relieve symptoms or come with significant side effects.

This is the problem the Anocis team is on a mission to solve.

Tackling one of medicine’s most persistent challenges

Pain management has long been one of healthcare’s most difficult balancing acts. On one side are drugs that often do not work well enough. On the other are opioids: highly effective in many settings, but challenged  by addiction risk, respiratory depression, constipation, sedation, and a host of broader societal consequences.

The need for better alternatives has become increasingly urgent in the context of the global opioid epidemic. Over the past two decades, opioid addiction and overdose have become a major public health crisis, particularly in the US, where prescription and illicit opioids are linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths and enormous social and economic costs. While opioids remain essential medicines for many patients, the scale of the crisis has intensified the search for safer, non-addictive approaches to pain management. Innovation in this space provides both a significant commercial opportunity, as well as a path to meaningfully improve patient outcomes while reducing one of healthcare’s most significant societal burdens.

As Anocis co-founder and CEO Andy McElroy puts it: “Current treatments for pain only help a relatively small proportion of people. And for severe pain, many patients end up on opioids – with all the risks that come with them.”

The Anocis founders believe there is a better way. The team is developing novel small-molecule therapies that target the peripheral sensory pathways responsible for transmitting pain and itch signals, with the goal of delivering significant symptom relief while avoiding the central nervous system effects that drive addiction and many of the worst side effects associated with today’s treatments.

A novel scientific approach to a complex clinical need

What makes Anocis’ innovation particularly exciting is that this is not another reformulation or incremental improvement on existing drugs. The company is pursuing novel biological mechanisms, based on emerging neuroscience research.

Its lead programme focuses on a target involved in peripheral pain and itch signalling – a receptor expressed in the spinal cord and skin, rather than the brain – which could allow Anocis’s therapies to modulate pain and itch pathways while significantly reducing the likelihood of addiction-related or other CNS-mediated side effects.

That peripheral biology is key to the venture’s thesis. If you can intervene before pain signals fully propagate through the nervous system, you may be able to preserve efficacy while dramatically improving safety.

The team has already identified two distinct series of potent, selective small-molecule compounds against this target, both with promising early drug-like properties and oral bioavailability. This is a significant and exciting scientific milestone.

Built by founders who have spent their careers in drug discovery

Drug discovery is notoriously difficult. Success requires not just scientific insight, but decades of pattern recognition, translational judgement, and executional experience. Anocis’s founding team brings exactly that:

CEO Andy McElroy PhD has spent more than 30 years in pharmaceutical R&D, including senior leadership roles at GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer, where he worked extensively in pain and neuroscience drug discovery. His career has spanned medicinal chemistry, global R&D leadership, and the management of large-scale external research programmes.

CSO Dermott O’Callaghan PhD brings over two decades of experience in neuropharmacology and translational drug discovery across multiple therapeutic areas, including pain, inflammation, and neurological disease. Together, the founders have spent much of their careers working in and around the precise biological systems Anocis is now targeting.

Complementing Andy and Dermott’s scientific leadership is Gunnar Staaf MBA, who brings 30+ years’ commercial and operational experience in the pharmaceutical sector building value in life sciences businesses. His focus at Anocis spans fundraising, market strategy, competitive positioning and commercial planning, helping ensure the company is well positioned to translate scientific breakthroughs into therapies that can reach patients at scale.

Anocis emerged from TRN – The Research Network Ltd, the founders’ long-running drug discovery consultancy and translational R&D platform, through which the team had access to a broad view of emerging therapeutic opportunities and extensive discovery infrastructure. Through this work, they have identified underexplored but compelling biological targets in pain and itch, and had the right ecosystem around them to act quickly when the opportunity arose.

In Andy’s words: “The knowledge was in the literature. Anyone could read it. But you need the experience to recognise what matters and why – and then the capability to do something about it.”

Why now for Anocis?

The opioid crisis has reshaped how the healthcare systems globally approach pain treatment. Regulators, clinicians, patients and pharma companies are all actively seeking safer alternatives. Yet despite enormous need, truly differentiated non-opioid therapies are scarce.

At the same time, advances in sensory neurobiology have created new opportunities to pursue mechanistically targeted approaches that were simply not feasible even a decade ago. The scientific tools have finally caught up with the clinical need, and Anocis is on track to capitalise on this moment.

Although still early, the Anocis team has already made significant progress. Through its work with the European Lead Factory, the company has benefited from screening and chemistry  support, enabling extensive drug discovery progress before their pre-seed institutional round led by Zinc.

That work has taken the programme into advanced lead optimisation, with:

• Two attractive lead compound series
• Early in vivo efficacy data in itch models
• Promising pharmacology and oral bioavailability
• Initial safety/tolerability signals

Zinc’s investment will support the next critical phase: generate the in vivo efficacy and safety data needed to further de-risk the programme and refine indication strategy, the company for larger follow-on financing. Over the next 9–12 months, the team expects to complete key preclinical studies that will shape the future direction of the business.

The scale of the opportunity

The venture is targeting two of the largest and most persistent unmet needs in medicine. Pain alone represents a market worth tens of billions globally, while chronic itch is increasingly recognised as a major and growing therapeutic category in its own right.

But beyond market size, what excites us most is the enormous potential real-world impact. Chronic pain is one of the leading causes of disability globally and one of the biggest reasons people are unable to work, creating profound personal, social and economic consequences. A safer, more effective pain treatment could improve life for millions of people worldwide while helping reduce society’s dependence on opioid medicines. An effective therapy for chronic itch could likewise transform quality of life for patients living with debilitating dermatological, immune-related and systemic conditions, many of whom currently have few satisfactory treatment options.

As Andy described when we asked what success looks like: “Our vision is a world where doctors can prescribe effective relief for severe pain without needing to reach for opioids first.”

Why Zinc is backing Anocis

At Zinc, we invest in founders building Science-for-Impact ventures that can improve health outcomes at scale. Anocis embodies what we look for:

• A world-class founding team with deep domain expertise.
• A technically differentiated approach to one of healthcare’s most urgent and persistent unmet needs.
• The potential to address not only a vast commercial market, but a major societal challenge: chronic pain is one of the leading causes of disability and unemployment globally, while opioid addiction continues to devastate families and communities worldwide.
• A clear pathway to value inflection through near-term technical milestones.
• And the opportunity to deliver meaningful impact for millions of patients by helping shift pain treatment toward safer, more effective and less addictive therapies.

With critical efficacy and safety studies underway, the team is now approaching the next major inflection point on its journey to success, one that can meaningfully advance both the science and the commercial opportunity.

We believe Anocis has all the ingredients to become a category-defining company in next-generation pain and itch therapeutics and are proud to be partnering with Andy, Dermott and the wider team as through this next phase of development and beyond.