Empress Therapeutics

The microbes that have evolved alongside humans are a gold mine of genetic information . Some of the bacteria living peacefully in our gut and on our skin have enzymes that help create compounds that act on targets involved in human diseases. Recently, advances in sequencing technologies have made it easier for scientists to access genetic information about the enzymes that make those compounds. Insights from metagenomics—the study of nucleotide sequences from a specific population, like microbes that dwell in the gut—have already led to new biologic drugs. Now biotechnology start-up Empress Therapeutics is working to apply a similar process to small molecules. The goal, in short: get chemical insights from the metagenome, then use those to develop small molecules. “Nature has run the biggest phenotypic screen ever, the biggest clinical trial ever,” cofounder and CEO Jason Park says. “You’ve got all this chemistry inside your body that interacts with