French biotech startup Generare has closed a €5 million seed round (around $5.5 million at current exchange rates) to step up development of what it touts as a highly scalable approach to identifying promising compounds for drug discovery that already exist in nature. It’s focused on sifting for molecules that are produced by microorganisms but could be repurposed as treatments in humans.
Such molecules were once a rich source of drug discovery using early chemistry-based discovery techniques. The cardinal example is Penicillium’s antibiotic effect that was spotted after the mold happened to grow in a lab petri. But finding less common molecules that could become the basis for new antibiotics, anticancer or other drugs requires a new kind of approach that can sift through large amounts of genetic material, says Generare co-founder and chief science officer Dr Vincent Libis.
“We are really interested in discovering chemical molecules produced by bacteria,” he explains. “They encode them in genes — which is basically [a] genetic recipe for [a] molecule. And so what we are hunting for is these genetic recipes.
And our technologies are all focused on detecting novel genetic recipes and then manipulating them to obtain the molecules that they encode.” “So [it’s] a lot of molecular biology to sequence DNA, to cut and paste DNA, and bioinformatics, or computational biology, to triage which one of these genetic recipes you want to go after first, and what do you e.