Venture Capital
BBV Founder Spotlight: Cameron Pye — Unnatural Products
February 2, 2021
Tell us about your company. What defines your innovation?
Unnatural Products (UNP) is working to abolish the term “undruggable” by combining machine learning and parallel chemistry techniques. The undruggable space is essentially a cell permeability problem: we can engineer large molecules to bind any challenging target (ie antibodies) but large molecules aren’t cell-permeable and thus can’t access the vast majority of potential drug targets inside the cell. UNP’s platform solves this by engineering cell permeability into larger than usual molecules; unlocking a long sought after target class.
Where did your company’s name come from?
We’ve actually had a solution to undruggable targets for some time in the form of natural products, molecules that nature makes that we repurpose as therapeutics. The type of molecules we’re focused on at UNP are called macrocycles and we’ve been using a variety of natural product macrocycles as drugs for things like immunomodulation and antibiotics. UNP is borrowing a few tricks from nature but using chemical synthesis to expand the tool kit and design this macrocycle class, hence the name Unnatural Products.
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