Founder Profile: Finding A Needle In A Haystack With Machine Learning

Charlie: In the fall of 2016, Barry Goldman approached me about a business plan he had formulated based on his thirty-plus years in research science. I thought Barry’s plan had merit and I was selling my old business and was in a position to start a new company. We agreed to give it a try. With that, Pluton Biosciences was officially born in January 2017.  

Pluton Biosciences is a microbial discovery company who conducts targeted basic research and licenses our discoveries – which are new (or novel byproducts from) bacteria, fungi, and viruses – to producers of sustainable biosolutions.  

Micromining is the microbial discovery platform our scientists use. It’s a high throughput process that screens billions of microbes from a diverse set of microbial communities to find the handful of useful microbes (the actives) against a specific target (the outcome).

To give a concrete example, our first Micromining target was to kill the larvae of the mosquito Aedes aegypti, carrier of the Zika virus, and vector for yellow fever, dengue fever, and Chikungunya. Through Micromining, we found ten new bacteria with insecticidal properties to kill Aedes larvae from 100 random samples of soil. Some of the soil samples came from our own backyard!

Microbes are primarily bacteria, fungi, and viruses. They live everywhere; in us, on us, all around us. Over the past 4 billion years, microbes have developed millions of unique chemical pathways, enabling them to do just about anything us humans can imagine happening in the physical world. They are nature’s master inventors and there are billions of new microbial species waiting to be discovered.  

Pluton’s first experiments target finding new microbes to replace dangerous chemical treatments in the agriculture and pest control industries.

Until the 1980s, it wasn’t. The golden age of Antibiotics from the ’40s through the ’70s was driven by assay-based microbial discovery techniques. Big pharma quit looking for several reasons. One was they were having trouble finding new active microbes with the tools available at the time.

Now, with big data and genomic sequencing, assay-based discovery can pick up where they left off. Second up, a now dated hypothesis took hold that “99% of bacteria in soil can’t be cultured in the lab”. Since many of the antibiotics had come from soil discovery, this dogma slowed attempts at further research.  

A third factor was the cost of discovery. The laborious techniques were full of dead ends and required “blockbuster” drugs to justify the investment.

Combining today’s tools with our high throughput approach and talented research scientists, Pluton aims to be at the forefront of a new golden age of microbial discovery.  

We envision collaboration will be at the center of our licensing strategy. This is nothing new. Typically, a lab (academic or commercial) use a “Material Transfer Agreement” to grant other organizations a limited “research-only” license. Patents are also typically filed before an MTA is granted.  

From here, if the receiving organization believes the discovery can yield a viable product, they can negotiate for an exclusive commercial license, enter into a joint venture, or various other flavors of development agreements.

We have killed a lot of mosquito larvae in the lab! With minimal resources, Pluton now has 10 different strains of bacteria that hitherto have not been used, either widely or at all, in insecticidal treatments. We have one joint development agreement underway and are negotiating two more – one of which is for a new mosquito biolarvicide.    

Microbial discovery is a basic research service. In 2015, academic labs conducted 81% of the basic research nationwide. Bio-producers currently have three choices for sourcing new commercial discoveries: they can wait for academic labs to publish new discoveries, they can make new discoveries through their own in-house research efforts, or they can buy new products that have been developed by startup companies.

Waiting on academic research misses market opportunities, in-house research requires investments in expensive infrastructure, and buying developed products requires paying a premium. Pluton’s Micromining® platform offers bioproducers a low-cost targeted “buy not make or wait” alternative to microbial discovery and allows established producers to fully leverage their own product development infrastructure. 

Pluton is a first mover play. Our objective is to rapidly build a patent portfolio of novel microbial compositions for commercial development. Our assay-design and microbial selection know-how are trade secrets. Pluton’s long-term competitive advantage resides in lab automation investments, team expertise, and our Microbiome Library of sample sources.

This proprietary database will enable Pluton to characterize microbiomes and use AI to virtually target new microbial sources for commercial discovery and research collaboration.

Actually agriculture crop protection & stimulants along with environmental vector control are our first target industries. They have a shorter regulatory path to market than Pharma. Other uses for our research include recycling and waste remediation, environmental restoration, health & wellness products, food nutrition & safety,

In 5 years, we’d like to have a small group of scientists working in a highly automated lab environment churning out 5 to 6 commercial discoveries per year for customers. Alongside this high-throughput research lab, Pluton will have a big data “Microbiome Data Library” built. This proprietary data library will become a subscription-based research portal helping researchers to define new targets and model the impact and effectiveness of microbial solutions in the environment.

Seed capital will be spent in 2019 and 2020 to:

• Bring founders into business full-time, hire a computational biologist
  
• Outfit lab with equipment and staff to make two new discoveries
  • Assay-ready targets
    • Agriculture: Root-knot nematode, Fall Armyworm, Whiteflies
      
    • Animal Health: Horn Flies
      
• Formulate & co-license mosquito larvicidal
  
• Secure customers for JDA’s on two discoveries
  
• Hire Data engineers/software developers to build LIMS and Microbiome Library database

As for the last question, it is anticipated that Pluton will not outlay significant capital to license our mosquito larvicide or other biopesticides developed from our first discovery. The nature of Joint Development Agreements is the licensee bears most of the cost of development in exchange for access to the licensor’s intellectual property.