LifeMine Raises $188 Million to Restart Its Fungal Genomics Drug Discovery Engine

Fungi have yielded molecules that transformed medicine, including penicillin and cyclosporine. Now, LifeMine Therapeutics wants to turn such chance discoveries into a systematically searchable process. According to Fierce Biotech, the company has completed a $188 million Series E financing round, with investors including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and RA Capital. The funding will be used to revive its fungal genomics drug discovery platform after a period of retrenchment and to advance the clinical-stage immunosuppressant LIFE-001.

LifeMine has accumulated sequencing data from approximately 100,000 fungal strains and identified about 1,200 potential drug targets. It is not searching for drugs to treat fungal infections, but for bioactive small molecules that fungi have produced over long periods of evolution and that can act on human proteins. This “top-down” approach starts with targets implicated in human disease, then searches for natural molecules that may be encoded by fungal gene clusters, in an effort to reach targets that are difficult to address through conventional chemical screening.

The new funding will also be used to introduce AI agents, with software dividing the work of genomic searches, candidate molecule ranking, and experimental planning. This application is more specific than the broad notion of “AI drug discovery”: the models will work with LifeMine’s proprietary fungal genomic and biosynthetic data rather than relying solely on public literature to infer answers. However, the company has not disclosed the predictive accuracy of its AI agents, their prospective experimental hit rate, or how many of the 1,200 targets have been validated in cell and animal studies. Whether the platform can consistently produce drugs still cannot be established by the scale of its data or the amount of financing alone.

LIFE-001 is currently the candidate closest to clinical validation. It is an engineered calcineurin inhibitor intended for development in immune-mediated diseases and organ transplant rejection. Drugs in this class suppress T-cell activation and have long been important tools in transplant medicine. LifeMine’s key task is to demonstrate whether the new molecule can maintain immunosuppressive activity while offering safety, exposure characteristics, or dosing convenience sufficient to support long-term use.

ClinicalTrials.gov data show that a Phase 1 trial of LIFE-001 is recruiting healthy adults and is expected to enroll 160 participants to study safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacodynamics at single and multiple ascending doses. The registered protocol covers single doses ranging from 10 to 1,500 mg, as well as repeated subcutaneous injections once or twice weekly. The trial began on April 7, 2025, and is estimated to be completed on November 13, 2026.

The registration also draws a clear boundary around the financing news: LIFE-001 is still establishing a foundation for dosing and safety in healthy participants and has not yet provided evidence of efficacy in preventing rejection among transplant patients. For LifeMine, the $188 million buys time to restart the platform and advance clinical development. Whether fungal genomes can become a reproducible source of drugs will ultimately be determined by the experimental hit rate of its candidate molecules and the risk-benefit profile of LIFE-001 in subsequent patient trials.