UK start-up HotHouse Therapeutics is on a mission to produce drugs commercially via specifically engineered plant lines. The start-up’s technology enables any naturally occurring medicinal compound to be reproduced by a host plant, potentially creating high value crops for use in Controlled Environment Agriculture (a topic touched on by Professor Derek Stewart at the 2023 Vertical Farming World Congress last month).
Some of the most potent drugs known to mankind are produced by plants, but issues such as accessing source material from rare plants and modifying the complex chemicals have meant they have been largely abandoned by the drug discovery industry to date. HotHouse is taking on this challenge and will be closing a £2.5m funding round imminently.
How the technology was developed
HotHouse Therapeutics is a spin-out from the laboratory of Professor Anne Osbourn OBE FRS at the UK’s John Innes Centre. It grew from a breakthrough in understanding the biosynthesis of the vaccine adjuvant QS-21, used in vaccines for Covid 19, malaria, shingles and RSV.
The initial forerunner in the race for a Covid 19 vaccine was produced by Novavax, it was a vaccine that used a QS-21 plant derived adjuvant containing saponins from the Chilean Soapbark Tree. A single gram of the pure material costs more than US$100,000, something of a limiting factor in vaccine development.
The tree bark also contains even more potent molecules that are present in such tiny amounts that they cannot be extracted at commercial scale. However, With HotHouse Therapeutics’ technology these hyper-potent molecules can be synthesised in a biofactory, removing the need for extraction from wild trees and addressing a significant unmet need in the vaccine industry.
HotHouse Therapeutics
Martin Stocks, co-founder of HotHouse Therapeutics, explains: “HotHouse Therapeutics has the capability of isolating and reconstructing the entire biosynthetic pathway for any metabolite/chemical that is made by any plant or other organism.
“We can produce a compound of interest in our plant biofactory and modify the pathway to improve its properties.
“Plants have all the background chemistry and metabolic diversity to accept and operate biosynthetic pathways from other plants, animals, and microbes, making a plant remarkably flexible in its capabilities.”
The company will be bio-engineering new high-potency adjuvants, alongside other projects to produce and improve other molecules with potential anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer activities.
Stocks continues: “We imminently expect to close our seed funding round of more than £2.5m from a consortium of UK venture capital investors.
“The endgame for HotHouse Therapeutics will be the generation of novel plant-produced drugs, probably made in specifically engineered plant lines. Such lines will require secure, contained facilities to grow the biomass needed for drug production.
“We are considering the potential of hydroponics and vertical farming in the manufacture of our products. We are interested in engaging potential partners in this space and accessing development funding to explore routes to viable and sustainable production systems.”
HotHouse Therapeutics was showcased at Agri-TechE’s REAP Conference 2023 in the Start-Up Showcase, which saw presentations from early-stage companies that are addressing increasingly urgent real-world problems from a different perspective.
