Company Profile
LifeMine Therapeutics
Company Overview
LifeMine Therapeutics, Inc. is the first biotechnology company exploiting the unique ability of fungi to produce powerful drugs optimized through billions of years of evolution, with the overall mission towards discovering and deploying new molecules for the treatment of intractable human diseases via novel biological mechanisms. The company is using genome mining and synthetic biology approaches to mount a massive campaign for finding novel drugs throughout the fungal biosphere. With operations in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Manhattan, New York, LifeMine brings a unique approach to its revolutionary scientific and medical mission.
Company History
We are an Early Discovery Company located at Discovery Park in Cambridge. LifeMine was founded in 2016 by Gregory L. Verdine, Harvard professor and Serial Entrepreneur. He has started 10 companies in his career with 6 of those having gone public, including Variagenics, Enanta, Eleven Bio, Tokai, Wave Life Sciences, and Aileron, and a private company, Gloucester Pharmaceuticals, that was acquired by Celgene. These companies have succeeded in achieving FDA approval for three marketed drugs.
Currently he is working on companies 9 and 10: being Fog Pharma and LifeMine Therapeutics. Our company began its journey with 3 employees and was created on the idea that nature has already given us a cure for some incurable diseases. The company is using genome mining and a recombinant overexpression approach to search for novel drugs in fungus.
We believe nature gives us the cures we need, we just need to know where to look for it. Both penicillin and Statins were created from fungi and though, drug discovery by brewery has proven to be difficult and time-consuming, leaving the field in search of a disruptive technological solution.
With our drug discovery engine we’ve been able to dramatically accelerating the search for nature’s breakthrough drugs. We now have our own strains and are in process of building a site in Gloucester to collaborate with our non-profit.
We currently have a little over 50 employees and are doubling in size again, building out all functions and moving into a larger facility to enable this expansion.