A Watertown biotech company built on mining fungal genomes for new medicines has landed $263 million in fresh capital, a milestone its founder is calling the payoff of years spent chasing scientific bets that didn't always pan out. LifeMine Therapeutics announced the funding windfall on Thursday, money the company will use to push a novel organ-transplant drug into a Phase 2 study in kidney-transplant patients. For Greg Verdine, the scientist-turned-biotech entrepreneur behind LifeMine, the raise caps what he's describing as a personal turning point after a long career of ambitious, sometimes stalled ventures.
“I'm on a roll this year, and planted seeds have started to bear fruit,” Verdine said, according to The Boston Globe. The comment captures a rare moment of enjoyment for a researcher who, as the Globe reports, has spent decades building companies around scientific ideas years ahead of their commercial payoff. LifeMine is headquartered in Watertown, and the new capital arrives alongside a second milestone for Verdine: Parabilis Medicines, another company he founded, has also been hitting major corporate benchmarks this year.
A Fungal-Derived Answer to a Transplant Problem
LifeMine's lead drug candidate, LIFE-001, is a calcineurin inhibitor derived from fungi and designed to suppress the immune system after organ transplantation, according to the Globe's reporting. That's a big deal because standard calcineurin inhibitors like tacrolimus, approved by the FDA in 1997, remain the backbone of rejection prevention but cause chronic nephrotoxicity and progressive kidney decline over time, per NCBI Bookshelf. More than 49,000 healthy organs were transplanted into sick patients in the United States last year, and nearly all of those recipients will take immunosuppressant drugs for life — drugs that can be toxic to organs including the kidneys they're meant to protect.
LifeMine says LIFE-001 may prove as effective as existing therapies while avoiding those tolerability issues. The company is wrapping up a Phase 1 study and expects to release data in October, and so far the trial has not produced major drug toxicities even as researchers increased the dose. The platform behind the drug draws on a long tradition in pharmaceutical history: fungi have been the natural source behind landmark medicines including penicillin, statins, and the early immunosuppressant cyclosporine, according to BioPharma Dive.
A Friend's Bet, and a Focused Pivot
The new money includes a $188 million Series E round backed by Bill Gates's investment firm, Jeff Bezos's investment firm, Milky Way Investments, and Lola Ventures, along with a previously undisclosed $75 million Series D round. That Series D only came together because Rick Klausner, Verdine's longtime friend, frequent collaborator, and a biotech executive and venture capitalist in his own right, agreed to lead it on one condition: LifeMine had to pause its broader platform work and focus squarely on advancing LIFE-001, per the same account.
It was a notable shift for a company that had spent years building out a genomic-mining platform, having identified roughly 1,000 genetic targets through sequencing before finishing that platform buildout. LifeMine plans to use artificial intelligence to analyze those targets going forward, but Klausner's push toward a single-asset focus reflects a broader tension in the field between expansive platform exploration and the harder discipline of getting one drug across the finish line. Klausner has said he believes LIFE-001 could become a vitally important drug — he's even suggested it could reach $20 billion in sales, according to his own estimate relayed by the Globe. He's also recalled that Verdine's academic grant applications were once reviewed as “brilliant, too ambitious,” a description that seems to have followed him into his corporate career. LifeMine laid off an undisclosed number of employees in 2025 as it worked toward this more focused strategy.
The Long Road From Warp Drive Bio
Verdine's current momentum traces back to a much rockier chapter. He launched Warp Drive Bio in 2012 with $125 million in initial backing from Third Rock Ventures, Greylock Partners, and Sanofi, becoming CEO the following year in what was, according to Fierce Biotech, his first time personally running one of his own startups. The company set out to mine microbial genomes for treatment opportunities and eventually targeted KRAS, a notoriously difficult cancer driver. But six years after launch, Warp Drive Bio still had not advanced a single drug into clinical trials, and Sanofi eventually shuttered its partnership with the company.
Revolution Medicines ultimately acquired Warp Drive Bio in an all-stock deal, and used its underlying technology to develop daraxonrasib, a KRAS-targeting cancer drug. That long-delayed payoff arrived in dramatic fashion this year: Revolution Medicines reported in April that daraxonrasib nearly doubled median overall survival for patients with previously treated metastatic pancreatic cancer, a trial result Hoodline covered in its report on a Detroit doctor's pancreatic lifeline. In the pivotal Phase 3 RASolute 302 trial, median survival reached 13.2 months compared with 6.7 months for standard chemotherapy, per the ASCO Post. On Tuesday, Revolution Medicines announced the FDA had accepted its New Drug Application for daraxonrasib and launched a U.S. Expanded Access Program for eligible patients, putting the drug on the verge of formal approval.
Two Companies, One Founder, a Big Year
While LifeMine was raising its Series E, Parabilis Medicines — the Cambridge-based company Verdine originally founded in 2015 as FogPharma, where “Fog” stood for “Friends of Greg,” before rebranding under CEO Mathai Mammen in October 2024 — was also on a roll. The company went public in June, a filing Hoodline detailed in its story on the biotech IPO wave sweeping the sector. Parabilis has also presented encouraging data on a peptide cancer therapy, its lead candidate FOG-001, also known as zolucatetide, a cell-penetrating peptide engineered to inhibit the interaction between beta-catenin and TCF transcription factors in solid tumors — a molecular target long considered largely undruggable.
Verdine's willingness to chase such difficult scientific targets traces back to his academic career. He spent more than three decades as the Erving Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University and Harvard Medical School, co-founding the academic fields of chemical biology and new drug modalities, according to Andreessen Horowitz. That background shaped a career built around what colleagues have described as ambitious, sometimes premature bets on undruggable biology — bets that took over a decade to start paying off in the form of daraxonrasib, LIFE-001, and FOG-001 alike.
A Founder's Worry Amid the Wins
Despite the string of good news, Verdine has voiced concern about the broader state of American science. He has said transformative scientific innovation can partly escape political and funding constraints, even as large-scale government funding cuts occur amid increased global competition. It's a tension that runs through his own career: platform biotechs like LifeMine and Parabilis take years, sometimes over a decade, to prove out, and Verdine's own trajectory — from a KRAS program that stalled for six years to a transplant drug now entering Phase 2 — illustrates just how long that runway can be, even when the science eventually works.
