WHAT WE DO
Our platform harnesses and directs plant biosynthetic pathways to deliver chemistry with therapeutic utility. Critically, we hijack the instructions from many different plant species and repurpose them into bespoke biosynthetic pathways that deliver chemical transformations to order, resulting in the production of both known and new-to-nature compounds, inaccessible by other means. This enables us to deliver high value novel chemistry, designed and optimised for human disease intervention.
Our AI/ML platform can mine the rich biosynthetic machinery of the plant kingdom, learn the molecular language of nature’s chemical lexicon and apply that knowledge to the problem of unmet medical need. Crucially, our platform allows us to translate such digital molecular-design outputs into real-world chemistry that can be applied to pharmaceutical development.
Humans have sourced medicines from the plant kingdom for thousands of years. With more than 400,000 plant species on the planet, only a small fraction of the potential drug candidates have been investigated. Plants have evolved to use chemicals to interact with other organisms in their environment, and the products they make are rich in bioactivity. This makes them a highly enriched source of new drug leads. The issue of accessing and furthermore, optimising this complex chemistry at scale has led to a huge decline in natural product-based drug discovery in the last few decades. Unlike the companies that have gone before us, HotHouse Therapeutics is unencumbered by the limitations of natural chemistry and uses a traditional design-make-test cycle to deliver optimised novel chemistry, tailored to the problem.
Of current drugs are natural products
... or are natural product-inspired. The need for new chemistry has never been higher with an ever-increasing patient population urgently requiring new therapeutics.POTENTIAL BIOACTIVE NATURAL PRODUCTS
… are estimated to be made by the plants that currently inhabit the planet. The instruction manuals needed to make these natural products are hidden in the genomes of >400,000 plants.POTENTIAL BIOSYNTHETIC GENES
… are waiting to be discovered and guided by our AI-platform, we can understand and harness these genes to synthesise new-to-nature therapeutics.Who we are
Dr David Sheppard
Chief Executive Officer
Professor Anne Osbourn OBE FRS FLS
Chief Science Officer
Dr Martin Stocks
Chief Operating Officer
Dr Phil Spence
Head of Informatics