BIONEWS
Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos joined RA Capital in a $188M Series E—part of a $263M combined round that includes a previously undisclosed $75M Series D—to revive the fungal genomics hunt that produced LIFE 001, an experimental
Last year LifeMine laid off staff and froze its fungal-genomics drug-discovery platform to conserve cash for a single clinical asset. Last month Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos paid $188 million, three to four times more than the company had planned to raise, to thaw it back open.
The Series E, reported by FierceBiotech and corroborated by BioPharma Dive and BioSpace, pairs with a previously undisclosed $75 million Series D closed in November 2025. The total, $263 million, is the cash LifeMine needs to keep LIFE-001 in the clinic while restarting the platform that produced it. RA Capital Management joined Gates and Bezos as new investors; GSK and Google Ventures stayed in.
LIFE-001, a next-generation calcineurin inhibitor, is a drug that blocks the same molecular target cyclosporin and tacrolimus have hit since the 1980s to keep organ transplants from being rejected. The first participant was dosed in April 2025, and the company has since generated safety data in more than 100 healthy volunteers, according to FierceBiotech. Calcineurin inhibitors work, but the current class, cyclosporin, tacrolimus, and Aurinia Pharmaceuticals' Lupkynis (voclosporin), is associated with kidney toxicity, neurotoxicity, and the long metabolic tail that makes transplant aftercare so punishing. CEO Gregory Verdine told FierceBiotech his team has "cleanly stripped away the tox and we have preserved the efficacy." That is a CEO claim about an early-stage asset, and the data behind it sits in healthy volunteers, not transplant patients.
The platform that produced LIFE-001 is the second leg of the bet. LifeMine sequences the genomes of fungi and reads the biosynthetic pathways, the genetic instruction sets fungi use to make natural molecules, as a drug library. The collection now spans roughly 100,000 fungal strains, organized into about 1,200 candidate drug targets. AI agents are, in Verdine's framing, downstream of that library: a triage layer to sort the 1,200 targets for partnership and out-licensing, which means letting another company develop and sell a drug the platform discovered, over the next month.
Last year's layoffs were a triage call: keep the most advanced molecule alive, freeze everything else, and hope the Phase 1 read gives the platform a second life. Verdine says it did. "Those guys were like, 'Greg, you got to bring back this platform,'" he recalled of his conversations with Gates and Bezos. The names are the share hook. The mechanism is what made them write checks.
LifeMine's discovery partnership with GSK, the company's largest Big Pharma backer, has stalled after GSK reprioritized internally. Verdine floated a possible "mark 2" collaboration in the FierceBiotech interview, but no terms have been announced, and the original work is on hold. For a round built around a revived discovery platform, an absent pharma partner is the criticism that has to sit next to the celebrity investors, not behind them.
The next concrete test is the Phase 1 read-out, expected to extend into 2026, alongside the first wave of partnered or out-licensed targets from the 1,200-candidate triage. If LIFE-001 stays clean in patient studies and the platform produces even one pharma-ready molecule beyond LIFE-001, the 3-to-4-times oversubscription starts to look like a pricing of optionality, not a flex. If it does not, Gates and Bezos have paid a known platform-discovery premium to find out.