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Axial invests and partners in early-stage life sciences companies. If you or someone you know has a great idea or company in life sciences, Axial would be excited to get to know you and possibly invest in your vision and company — info@axialsprawl.com
DiCE Molecules is pushing the business model possibilities for small molecule companies. Centered around a directed evolution technology for DNA-encoded libraries, DiCE is a useful case study on how hard it is to build a licensing business for small molecules and how to use a small molecule platform to find rare chemical matter to translate into valuable products.
Founded in 2013 by Kevin Judice, Phil Patten, and John Bedbrook, DiCE was premised on bringing directed evolution to chemistry. The founders took work out of the Harbury Lab at Stanford to combine mesofluidic technologies with directed evolution to build a DNA-encoded library with both screening and optimization built-in, which the company calls directed chemical evolution or DiCE.
In the 1990s, Kevin and John as well as Pehr Harbury were postdocs at UC Berkeley in the Schultz Lab (a pioneer in chemical biology). Harbury became a professor in the Stanford biochemistry department doing work in combinatorial chemistry and directed chemical evolution. While Judice went on to work as a scientist at Genentech then moving up as a senior director there and afterwards founding Achaogen to develop new antibiotics, a company…
