Fungi can be considered a forgotten source of drug discovery. These microbes sparked a wave of transforming life-saving drugs, which are still used today as antibiotics, immunosuppressants and cholesterol lowering. But these drugs are old, and research on fungi-based drugs has mostly dried up in recent decades. Gregory Verdine, co-founder and CEO of biotech start-up LifeMine Therapeutics, explains that it is becoming increasingly difficult for Big Pharma, which has invested time and resources, to discover promising drug leads.
Verdine thinks fungi have a lot more to offer, and all that’s needed is a way to tap the well. LifeMine Therapeutics has developed a technology that analyzes the genetics of fungi and identifies the small molecules they make — molecules that are potential drugs.
“Fungi have been on Earth for about a billion years, and they’ve been optimized for hundreds of millions of years,” Verdine said. “What we’re doing is accessing it.”
LifeMine now has $175 million to drive the research and a new drug discovery alliance with GlaxoSmithKline that is reinvesting in fungal drug research abandoned by many of its big pharma peers.The investment round announced Wednesday is Series C financingled by Fidelity Management & Research Company, a new investor in the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech startup.
Many of the drugs people use today were designed by chemists. Verdine, a serial entrepreneur and former Harvard chemistry professor, likens the effort to starting with a set of atoms and then plugging things into them like adding to a set of Lego bricks. It works, and many drugs today are developed in this way. But the problem, Verdine says, is that this approach has a high failure rate and is really slow. Long before this synthetic approach became the mainstream approach to drug discovery, the search for new drugs was based on natural products, substances produced by organisms such as fungi.
Fungi can be used for drug research, Verdine said, because they produce substances that are very close to finished drugs and don’t require much additional tweaking. The first cholesterol-lowering statin, lovastatin, came from Aspergillus terreus. Penicillin comes from the fungus Penicillium. Molecules for these drugs could go straight out of the fungus and into a patient, Verdine said.
The usefulness of fungal-derived drugs is offset by a major obstacle. Fungi spit out tens of thousands of compounds, so it can be difficult to figure out which compounds do what, Verdine said. Big Pharma halted fungal-based drug discovery due to inability to efficiently identify promising molecules. LifeMine has developed a proprietary platform that employs high-throughput biology, artificial intelligence and other techniques to search for molecules with targets and biological functions that can be applied as pharmaceuticals. Rather than scouring the ocean of molecules for potential drugs, LifeMine looks for fungal genes. Verdine says LifeMine’s approach is like finding blueprints for factories that make products, rather than finding the products themselves. Discovering the blueprint can provide insight into a product, in this case, a potential drug.
“That’s something we’ve only been able to do until recently, which is knowing what the function of a genetic drug is,” Verdine said.
LifeMine’s history dates back to 2016, when Verdine partnered with co-founder and COO Weiqing Zhou (then WuXi AppTec’s entrepreneur-in-residence) and venture capitalist and WuXi AppTec senior advisor Hingge Hsu. Richard Klausner’s experience includes founding Juno Therapeutics and Grail, joining as a co-founder when the company raised capital in 2017 $55 million in Series A funding. Last year, LifeMine raised another $50 million in Series B financing This marked progress, including acquisitions of fungal strain collections from Pfizer and Merck and other pharmaceutical giants.
The startup aims to use some of the new funding to develop its internal pipeline. While fungal-derived molecules could have applications in a wide range of therapeutic areas, the startup’s main program focuses on genetically validated cancer drivers. This research is independent of the GlaxoSmithKline Drug Discovery Alliance. Verdine said the seeds of the collaboration were sown in a conversation about two years ago with the pharma giant’s chief scientific officer Hal Barron and its senior vice president of medical science technology Tony Wood (Wood will bear Barron took the role of chief scientific officer after leaving this summer). According to Verdine, the trio discussed how to deploy LifeMine’s science in the most impactful ways. By the end of last year, executives hammered out the details of the drug discovery alliance.
under Terms of Agreement, the companies are equal partners in the discovery of small-molecule leads that could address up to three undisclosed targets in humans. The targets will be provided by GlaxoSmithKline and cover multiple as yet undisclosed disease areas. GSK will pay LifeMine $70 million up front, including a cash and equity investment, as part of a Series C financing announced Wednesday. If the molecules resulting from the research can be tested in humans, GlaxoSmithKline will take over the development. LifeMine can receive milestone payments related to the progress of these drug candidates, as well as royalties on the sale of any commercialized products.
Speaking with GSK, Verdine said LifeMine is not looking for other partners. But the deal isn’t an exclusive deal, and LifeMine is now looking at other potential alliances. Verdine said the biotech’s discovery engine is scalable and can be used to conduct drug research across multiple therapeutic areas.
“There’s a lot of room for discovery, and we’ll do other deals,” he said.
LifeMine’s latest financing includes new investors Invus and 3W Partners Capital, with participation from GSK through a strategic alliance. The round also included early investors GV, ARCH Venture Partners, Blue Pool Capital and MRL Ventures Fund.
Photos by Flickr users Albert Straub through Creative Commons license
