Exclusive: Holoclara raises $16 million Series A to

develop therapeutics—with worms

June 27, 2024

A worm-filled freezer looks more or less like any other freezer.

It’s bigger and colder, sure, but the primary difference is a matter of content—a worm

freezer is packed with millions of dust-sized worms in cryosleep.

I didn’t end up in a Caltech worm lab alone, of course: I was there with Andrea Choe,

CEO and cofounder of Holoclara, a biotech startup that’s looking to develop

therapeutics using worms. For Choe, a Caltech biology PhD and USC MD, worm

labs like this are part of her origin story, since she’d been studying worms for years

by the time she cofounded Holoclara in 2017.

And now, the company just hit a milestone: Holoclara has raised $16 million for its

Series A, Fortune has exclusively learned. Bold Capital Partners led the round, with

participation from Horizons Ventures, Tarrasque, Endurance28, Freeflow Ventures,

and a number of angel investors. Kairos Ventures is a previous investor.

If you’re wondering why all the fuss, the answer’s pretty simple: In the scientific

sense, worms are rather special.

“It’s the one organism that I would say is the simplest, that we know the most about,

and that’s why you’ve seen so many Nobel Prizes from C. elegans [roundworms],”

said Choe. “You know everything about it, from when it goes from one cell, to two, to

four to the entire organism.”

Worms have co-evolved with humans for millions of years. Now, there’s mounting

evidence that worms hold potential as therapeutic agents, as suggested by cases

where exposure to worms has, for example, alleviated conditions like asthma.

“You can develop tools within this organism,” said Choe. “Don’t forget, you lay it flat

on a microscope, on a thin sheet of agar, with a tiny drop of anesthetic and it’ll just go

to sleep on its side—you can then zap with a laser any single cell or neuron you

want.”

So, that’s what Holoclara is chasing—that for even debilitating allergies and

autoimmune disorders, there could be treatments and medications built on worm

molecules. Choe’s uniquely situated to be the person doing this, too: In graduate

school, she made a first-of-its-kind discovery, that worms have a molecular language

that they use to communicate across their entire phylum.

You could say that opened a can of worms, as Choe began building Holoclara based

on that discovery. As for the company’s name, it’s taken from the Greek word for

“complete,” as Holoclara looks to complete our understanding of molecular history.

One of my favorite activities of late is asking VCs what the total addressable market

is for something in which there’s simply no way to know. Neal Bhadkamkar, Bold

general partner, kindly obliged the question.

“Oh my God,” was his first reaction, followed by:

“I don’t know, but it has the potential to open up a large class of potential therapies

from different kinds of worm species,” said Bhadkamkar. “There are many different

kinds and they haven’t really been studied. There are already lots of other people

mining other kinds of systems, like plants. But people haven’t really dug into the

worms category in particular—and worms have evolved with us, and they’re known to

be used in traditional cultures.”

It’s hard to overstate that last point. Even if worms aren’t your thing, there’s an

undeniably long evolutionary history between worms and humans. Paul Sternberg,

Holoclara cofounder and longtime Caltech professor, put it to me like this: Per the

fossil record, worms have been around for an unfathomably long time, possibly 900

million years, and they’ve been interacting with our ancestors for that entire time.

This has allowed natural selection to engineer them for a long period of evolution,

and their unique relationship with human biology can (and should) be leveraged into

practical therapies.

“Imagine that this research amounts to basically having a pill,” said Sternberg. “Think

about how [common diabetes medications like] statins and metformin are definitely

safe enough that millions of people take them—and they’re really important.”

It all comes back to studying these tiny organisms, which is a precise task—but not

one devoid of mirth. One of the things I learned about worms is that there are

different ways to categorize them, including by how they present under a microscope.

I saw some “dumpys” (short and rotund) and “uncs” (which stands for

uncoordinated). Worms can even behave in ways that correlate to humans, however

humorously.

Watching three worms tangle on a computer screen, I turned to one lab technician.

What are they doing?

He pointed: “Oh, that one’s trying to mate…but he’s not very good at it.”

Worms are funny. People are funny. When I first met Choe, I was entranced by the

idea of a life devoted to worm-based science. I asked her, how do you know when

you’re a worm person?

“I think once you start, day one, you’re a full worm person,” said Choe. “There’s no

going back. As soon as I saw the freezer open, and the fog come out, I was like ‘I’m

never going back.’”

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle

Twitter: @agarfinks

Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com