A year af­ter rais­ing a $47 mil­lion launch round, the fun­gi-lov­ing drug hunters at Hexa­gon Bio have more than dou­bled their cof­fers.

Hexa­gon an­nounced to­day that it raised an­oth­er $61 mil­lion for its ef­forts to de­sign can­cer and in­fec­tious dis­ease drugs based on in­sights mined from the DNA in mil­lions of species of fun­gi. The new fi­nanc­ing brings Hexa­gon’s com­mit­ted fund­ing to over $108 mil­lion.

Jakob Loven

Nex­tech In­vest led the fi­nanc­ing, along with new in­vestors Soft­Bank Vi­sion Fund 2 and Cas­din Cap­i­tal. The Col­umn Group, 8VC, and Two Sig­ma Ven­tures com­mit­ted funds as re­turn­ing in­vestors.

Along with lead­ing the fi­nanc­ing, Nex­tech In­vest’s man­ag­ing part­ner Jakob Loven will join Hexa­gon as a mem­ber of its board of di­rec­tors.

“We look for­ward to work­ing with Hexa­gon’s tal­ent­ed team to help re­al­ize the com­pa­ny’s am­bi­tious vi­sion of turn­ing na­ture’s hid­den mol­e­cules in­to first-in-class med­i­cines,” Loven said.

Hexa­gon is try­ing to ap­ply new tech­nol­o­gy to an old fash­ioned ap­proach: de­riv­ing drugs from fun­gi and oth­er mi­crobes. His­tor­i­cal­ly, many of the key break­throughs in the 20th cen­tu­ry were found this way, in­clud­ing peni­cillin and oth­er an­tibi­otics, and the ground­break­ing or­gan trans­plant drug cy­closporine.

Those drugs, though, were found by brute force: throw­ing mi­crobes at the wall and see­ing what stuck. Hexa­gon will use new ge­net­ic se­quenc­ing, ma­chine learn­ing and oth­er tech­niques to try to tap as yet undis­cov­ered weapons lurk­ing in the mi­cro­bial ar­mory.

As then-CSO Tod Smeal not­ed to End­points News last year, there are about 5 mil­lion fun­gal species but on­ly 5,000 have been se­quenced, leav­ing lots to be dis­cov­ered.

The funds raised will al­low Hexa­gon to ex­pand its ge­nomics data­base and ac­cel­er­ate drug dis­cov­ery ef­forts.

Tod Smeal

“We are ex­cit­ed to em­bark on the next phase of growth to dis­cov­er and de­vel­op unique and po­tent ther­a­peu­tic com­pounds for a broad spec­trum of in­tractable dis­eases,” said Hexa­gon co-founder and CEO Mau­reen Hil­len­mey­er in a state­ment.

That sen­ti­ment re­flects what Smeal said last year to End­points — that while there is a fo­cus, Hexa­gon will re­main open on oth­er ther­a­peu­tic op­por­tu­ni­ties. In essence, they won’t be picky.

“We’re fo­cused on on­col­o­gy, but ini­tial­ly we’re go­ing to be work­ing in an­ti-in­fec­tives and on­col­o­gy,” the for­mer CSO of can­cer bi­ol­o­gy at Lil­ly Re­search Labs said. “We’re go­ing to be very op­por­tunis­tic, so de­pend­ing on what comes out of the plat­form, if there’s op­por­tu­ni­ties in oth­er ther­a­peu­tic ar­eas, we will prob­a­bly ex­plore them as well.”

The European Medicines Agency’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) recommended nine drugs for approval this week while also giving thumbs up for six expanded indications, including Novo Nordisk’s approved obesity medication Wegovy for younger people. Wegovy is already approved as an obesity treatment in the EU for adults, and the new indication would allow prescriptions for adolescents aged 12 and older.

RNA biotech GreenLight Biosciences has been handed an offer for potential acquisition.

GreenLight said in a release that it has received a non-binding “indication of interest” from Fall Line Endurance Fund to acquire GreenLight’s capital stock for $0.60 per share in cash. The release said any potential agreement between the two parties would depend on certain conditions.

Through a special committee, the biotech will evaluate the offer but added there’s no certainty a deal will go forward. GreenLight will also not make any more announcements until a deal comes through or “otherwise determines” a statement is necessary.

A public T cell biotech’s chief executive has decided to leave the company.

TScan Therapeutics said Friday morning that CEO David Southwell stepped down earlier this week, leaving both his chief executive and board member roles. Filling in is Gavin MacBeath, the company’s CSO and COO. He became the acting CEO on Tuesday, and will continue to remain CSO and COO, TScan’s announcement read.

The German life science group Sartorius will be picking up French contract manufacturer Polyplus for the price of €2.4 billion, or $2.6 billion.

On Friday, Sartorius announced the acquisition through its French subgroup, Sartorius Stedim Biotech, which will be acquiring Polyplus from private investors ARCHIMED and WP GG Holdings IV. Polyplus has 270 employees and produces materials and components that go into making viral vectors that are used in cell and gene therapies. This includes DNA/RNA reagents as well as plasmid DNA. Polyplus has locations in France, Belgium, China and the US.