NEW YORK — Drug discovery firm Hexagon Bio said on Tuesday that it has raised $47 million in a Series A financing round.
The round was led by The Column Group and included 8VC and Two Sigma Ventures. In conjunction with the round, The Column Group's David Goeddel has been named chairman of Hexagon.
Hexagon's discovery platform is designed to identify potentially therapeutic secondary metabolites and their protein targets directly from fungal genomes. The Menlo Park, California-based company said it has developed an algorithm called Ticker to identify human targets of these secondary metabolites and a synthetic biology platform called Hex for the expression of fungal biosynthetic genes and their encoded metabolites in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
Details about the Hex platform were reported in Science Advances in 2018.
Hexagon said it will use the Series A funding to develop a proprietary genomics database of new secondary metabolites and hire a drug discovery team to develop these compounds into drugs, with an initial focus on cancer and infectious disease.
"Hexagon has shown that we can build small molecules targeting key proteins in human disease using our database of microbial genomes," Hexagon CEO Maureen Hillenmeyer said in a statement. "Now it's time to scale up, and Hexagon is exceptionally well poised to do so using automation and large-scale DNA sequencing of microbes starting with fungi."