Natural Products Drug Discovery:
The Technology
Hypha's natural products drug discovery technologies are used to stimulate the production of novel and rare bioactive secondary metabolites, as well as macromolecules, from the fermentations of an under-exploited group of microorganisms: mushroom fungi (basidiomycetes and higher ascomycetes).
Hypha's proprietary techniques stimulate temperate and tropical basidiomycete fungi mushrooms & toadstools to dramatically increase the production of molecules, compared to the routine processes that have typically been used in industrial natural products drug discovery operations.
Although very different from the rainforest, the use of stimulators and proprietary growth medium allows Hypha’s fermentations to reproduce the stresses of life for rainforest fungi, promoting the production of natural biologically active molecule products for drug discovery.
“ They understood the technical challenges immediately, were able to develop an effective plan to solve the issues and delivered high quality results that were able to impact directly our internal research programs.”
Dr Steven M Martin, R&D Director, TMO, Guildford, UK
Hypha’s philosophy is ‘lower throughput, higher output’.
Not only does Hypha™ apply its stimulatory fermentation techniques, but by purposely reducing throughput Hypha™ is able to tailor fermentation harvest times to suit each individual fungus and maximise production.
In exemplification of the technology, Hypha is building an internal pipeline of anticancer and anti-infective leads derived from its MycoDiverseTM natural products drug discovery library of basidiomycete fermentation fractions and extracts.
Many of these leads novel and rare, carbocyclic molecules, and unavailable in other chemical screening libraries.