HotHouse Therapeutics

Startup

HotHouse Therapeutics is a UK-based synbio company that is manipulating the biosynthetic pathways of green plants to generate new drugs and other bioactive molecules.  We identify promising chemical structures in plants or other organisms that have new drug potential and engineer the biosynthetic machinery to optimise the molecules for therapeutic use.

A major strand of our activity is in the field of saponin vaccine adjuvants.  QS-21 is the paradigm for this class of molecule; a potent adjuvant that is extracted from the bark of the Chilean Soapbark Tree.  However, the tree bark also contains even more potent molecules that are present in such tiny amounts that they cannot be extracted at commercial scale. Other saponin generating plants also make similar molecules with interesting properties.

HotHouse Therapeutics uses machine learning and AI models to predict the bioactivity of these complex chemicals and their variants, and then uses its extensive genetic “toolkit” to construct the biosynthetic pathways that will express the optimum molecule in the tissues of a plant, from which it can be harvested at scale.

We are using genes from the Soapbark tree and other plants to bio-engineer new, high-potency adjuvants, alongside other projects to generate molecules with potential anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer activities.