With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1508543
ON THE RADAR ( the informer ) P acific surf crashes and mist clings to the tops of old-growth spruce and cedar at the mouth of Kapoose Creek. Here on the wild west coast of Vancouver Island, a startup is hoping to tap the frontier of fungi for new drugs. Kapoose Creek Bio operates a remote high-tech research facility overlooking the ocean and rainforest. From this base, staff collect fungi samples year-round, working closely with CEO Eric Brown, a Harvard-educated McMaster University biochemist. Brown's lab has developed a proprietary AI-driven platform dubbed unEarth RX that's enabling researchers to plumb the com- plexity of fungal biochemistry much faster than conventional approaches to laboratory drug discovery allow. According to Brown, 30 percent of the 5,000 fungi samples in Kapoose Creek's ever-growing collection have no known match in the public domain. "They're mysterious," he says. "Fungi are propelled by millions of years of inter- species evolution to create cer- Mushroom Kingdom How a B.C. startup is using AI-driven technology to explore the world of fungi for new therapeutic drugs by Andrew Findlay H E A LT H JAMES O'MARA THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS Thirty percent of Kapoose Creek Bio's fungi samples for medical treatment are mysteries in the public domain, says CEO Eric Brown OCTOBER 2023 BCBUSINESS.CA 11 tain chemicals. We don't know what they'll be useful for. We just know they're not created by accident. Nature doesn't make mistakes." Kapoose Creek is focused on three broad areas of medi- cal treatment: infectious dis- ease, cancer and neurological disorders such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Brown and his team con- duct two tests on biochemical compounds, known as metabo- lites, derived from the fungal samples. The first examines how these metabolites interact with human cells in culture. The second looks at how, or if, they influence animal behaviour. For test subjects, Brown uses the roundworm. Just a millimetre in length, this organism has a nervous system remarkably similar to that of humans. By recording the shape and movements of these worms, researchers can identify neurochemical effects. The AI platform uses machine learning to rapidly compare the results of these tests with thousands of known chemical compounds, from caffeine to acetaminophen. This produces what Brown calls "activity maps" that al- low researchers "to size up the therapeutic potential of these metabolites." MUSHROOM MONEY There are no shortage of B.C. companies trying to hit it big with fungi. Here are a few notable examples. CORE ONE LABS INC. Vancouver's Core One Labs bills itself as a "biotech company focused on bringing psychedelic medicine to market." In August, Core One achieved what it called a significant milestone in its efforts to develop proprietary methods of isolating and purify- ing psilocybin from mushroom biomass. NUMINUS WELLNESS Vancouver-based Numinus was the first company to gain permission from Health Canada to grow and extract psilocybin for research. It also offers ketamine therapy, while substances like MDMA are available through a Health Canada program. The company has clinics across North America and a massive research facility on Vancouver Island. OPTIMI HEALTH CORP. The Princeton-based company aims to produce scalable, natural mushroom formulations and other psychedelics for trans- formational human experiences. Its board of directors includes Lululemon founder Chip Wilson and Ocean Fisheries Ltd. founder Edward Safarik.