LifeMine Raises $263M to Push Transplant Drug Into 2027 Studies

LifeMine Therapeutics has raised $263M in new capital to accelerate LIFE-001, its clinical-stage candidate for organ transplant rejection. The financing pairs an oversubscribed $188M Series E led by Milky Way Investments with a previously completed $75M Series D, bringing total funding to $558M. Bezos Expeditions, Gates Frontier and RA Capital Management joined as new investors, while GV, LoLa Capital Partners, GSK, Invus and ARCH Venture Partners continued their backing.

The Watertown, Massachusetts-based company is attempting to turn fungi into a systematic source of medicines using human genetics, genomics, bioinformatics, machine learning and synthetic biology — an approach it calls Top-Down Drug Discovery. LIFE-001 is the clinical test of that platform. It is a structurally and mechanistically novel, precision-engineered, long-acting calcineurin activation inhibitor designed to avoid the immunophilin-dependent toxicity associated with legacy calcineurin inhibitors such as cyclosporine and tacrolimus. More than 1.6M people worldwide live with transplanted organs, and LifeMine is betting a different approach to calcineurin inhibition can protect those organs without the trade-offs patients have historically accepted.

The capital will fund a Phase 2 kidney transplant study and a Phase 1b islet cell transplant study planned for early 2027. Those studies follow a Phase 1 SAD/MAD program that enrolled more than 120 adult participants, with no clinically meaningful renal, metabolic or cardiovascular safety signals reported to date. The company acknowledges those results are early; the next stage is designed to ask harder questions about whether LIFE-001 can control rejection while avoiding legacy toxicities.

This round is not LifeMine's first validation. The company launched publicly in 2017 with a $55M Series A, followed by a $50M Series B in 2021 and a $175M Series C in 2022. GSK has also committed to the platform through a collaboration established in 2021–2022 with $70M upfront, targeting up to three undisclosed drug candidates. LifeMine consolidated operations in Watertown in 2025, prioritized LIFE-001, and is now raising behind an asset that has already entered humans rather than asking investors to finance possibility alone.

The composition of the Series E is notable: Milky Way Investments led, with Bezos Expeditions, Gates Frontier and RA Capital Management entering as new investors alongside continued support from GV, LoLa Capital Partners, GSK, Invus and ARCH Venture Partners. The financing arrives after management made an operational decision to focus resources on LIFE-001. LifeMine is led by CEO Gregory Verdine, COO WeiQing Zhou and Chairman Rick Klausner, all co-founders, with Simon Cooper as Chief Medical Officer and Yves Zinggeler, who joined as Chief Commercial Officer in 2026, signaling the organization is thinking beyond discovery.