Fungi in the lab
In 1928, a Scottish researcher by the name of Alexander Fleming came back from vacation to discover that he’d accidentally grown a species of fungi called Penicillium on a petri dish containing bacteria. The fungi, to Fleming’s surprise, appeared to be keeping the growth of that bacteria at bay. Further investigations led him to discover the life-saving antibiotic penicillin, which sparked a revolution in the treatment of infectious disease.
Almost a century later, Hexagon Bio wants to discover more medicinal uses for fungi (though this time, it will be on purpose). On September 15th, the company announced that it raised a $ 47 million Series A round that will help it genetically sequence fungi and find new breakthrough medications. The next penicillin, the company wagers, is already out there waiting to be discovered.
“We really view [Hexagon] as the first of a new generation of computational driven big pharma companies,” says Alex Kolicich, a founding partner of venture firm 8VC which invested in the round and Hexagon Bio board member. “From day one I thought they had a really strong ambition.”
The Menlo Park-based company was launched in 2017 as a spinout from Stanford University. One of the founding team members is Maureen Hillenmeyer, the former director of Stanford’s Genomes to Natural Products program and now Hexagon’s CEO. What makes Hexagon Bio unique, Hellenmeyer says, is the company’s multidisciplinary approach to finding new drug candidates. “We have really world-class expertise both in data science and biology, which is hard to come by,” she says.
Hexgon Bio founders Maureen Hillenmeyer, Colin Harvey, Brian Naughton and Yi Tang
Hexagon Bio uses these disciplines to sequence fungi genomes and detect whether or not they have been altered to protect from disease. The company then studies if any of the altered genes could be used to treat human diseases. It’s not a far-fetched idea. Statins, a group of cholesterol-lowering medications, were discovered by Japanese researcher Akira Endo in 1976 when he realized that genes in the Penicillium citrinum fungus allowed it to produce two compounds that can lower human cholesterol. Though the finding was remarkable, it took Endo multiple years to scan fungal genomes to find these compounds.
Hexagon Bio wants to speed up the process by using artificial intelligence and gene sequencing as part of its fungi screening platform. “We could have known just by reading its genome that this fungi was creating cholesterol inhibitors,” Hillenmeyer says of Endo’s discovery. Though gene sequencing was a nascent technology when Endo found statins in the 1970s, advances in low cost but high quality sequencing and other technological advances mean that it will be possible for Hexagon to discover drugs in a fraction of Endo’s time. “We’re going back to [nature] but applying AI and data science to it,” Hillenmeyer says.
The new capital from the Series A round will be used to build a proprietary database for fungi genomes, Hillenmeyer says, as well as hire people who can take newly discovered compounds through the clinical pipeline in the next few years. Though Hillenmeyer won’t name any of the compounds that the company has found so far, she says that they are mostly focused on looking for new medications to treat cancer and infectious diseases, including antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Someday Hexagon Bio might even branch out from fungi and look for medicines in other types of microbes, like bacteria. But not yet, Hillenmeyer says. “There’s an estimated 5 million fungal species on the planet, and only 5,000 have been studied so far,” she says. “That’s going to keep us busy for a while.”