Unnatural Products (UNP) is a company that unlocks the potential of macrocycle drug discovery through machine learning and massively parallel synthesis. Pulse 2.0 interviewed UNP co-founder and CEO Cameron Pye to learn more about the company.
Cameron Pye’s Background
Pye grew up in Atlanta but went west for college. And Pye said:
“I had a brief and passionate love affair with philosophy but found my real partner in chemistry and wound up pursuing chemical biology in Scott Lokey’s lab at UC Santa Cruz, where I did my PhD work and met my co-founder.”
Formation of UNP
How did the UNP idea come together? Pye shared:
“We were in the right place at the right time in Scott’s lab. He was funded through various pharma collaborations looking to unpack some rule-breaking molecules found in nature, macrocycles, and cyclic peptides and understand how they got away with the trick of being orally bioavailable and cell-permeable despite their size. During our time in the lab, some pioneering work allowed us to massively multiplex some assays and leverage computational and mass spectroscopy approaches to understand the tools nature was using.”
“This led us to found Unnatural Products to take those tools and use them in a more directed and synthetic approach to enable a new class of synthetic macrocycles able to drug challenging intracellular targets (often erroneously called undruggable) and provide oral delivery for targets currently only addressable with antibody therapeutics.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Pye reflected:
“When the team grew to the size that experiments were being designed, conducted, and interpreted without my or my co-founder’s input it was a real “pinch me, I might be dreaming” moment. The fact that this was all happening across a suite of computational, robotics, chemistry, and biology technologies we had built made it all the sweeter!”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Pye explained:
“At our core, we’re macrocycle chemistry experts. As previously mentioned, we’ve built a suite of technologies married across a variety of disciplines to be able to accomplish what took nature millions of years to evolve. We’re able to design and engineer these molecules to do the impossible: drug “undruggable” targets inside the cell which have been off limits to traditional small molecule approaches, and to replace injectable antibody therapeutics with oral, stable, and easy-to-manufacture macrocycles.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges has Pye faced in building the company? Pye acknowledged:
“It’s almost gouache to say that the biotech sector and particularly capital markets have been facing some challenges over the past couple of years. However, the macrocycle modality is garnering a lot of interest from a variety of pharma organizations looking to unlock the opportunity space. We’ve been able to find some fantastic partners who believe in the modality and our platform’s ability to execute, and have been able to leverage that to continue to build in, and thrive, in some choppy waters.”
Evolution Of UNP’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Pye noted:
“The technology is continuously evolving. Initially, our focus was on machine learning models for properties (like permeability and oral bioavailability) and parallel chemistry automation. Now we’ve developed generative AI strategies being layered into “chemist in the loop” design workflows and have onboarded a suite of discovery technologies which can feed this optimization engine with new interesting chemical matter against valuable biology.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Pye cited:
“Signing our first partnership with BridgeBio in 2021, securing our Series A funding in 2023, and inking a deal with Merck to collaborate on the development of macrocyclic candidates against oncology targets are all good candidates! More on that can be found in our recent press release here.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Pye about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“Not yet, but we can share that we’ve achieved some very impressive, first-in-class molecules in our collaboration with BridgeBio, a partnership we announced in 2021.”
Funding
After asking Pye about the company’s funding information, he revealed:
“We recently closed a $32 million Series A co-led by Merck GHIF and ARTIS Ventures. That funding will help us expand beyond oncology.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Pye assessed:
“We think macrocycles and cyclic peptides are one of the next foundational drug modalities; in many ways, they could be bigger than small molecules, so the potential TAM addressable by our technology is truly massive.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Pye affirmed:
“There have been a number of players in the macrocycle space before, but most have focused on the earliest part of the process, de novo discovery, or finding an initial binder. There have been some fantastic technologies developed and commoditized there, but what has been challenging is what comes next: optimizing the chemistry that comes out of these platforms. That’s UNP’s sweet spot, the ability to drive from initially promising binders to truly drug-like leads. We’re in the rarified air of groups that can do it. What we’re building at UNP is the industrialization of that to truly make it scalable and unlock the immense potential in this class.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Pye concluded:
“Driving some programs towards the clinic for ourselves and our partners, continuing to build the platform into the best macrocycle discovery and development engine!”
