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.’”
Ask Andy…In this week’s “Ask Andy” column, Bonobos cofounder Andy Dunn tackles a question from a founder wondering how much they should pay themselves––and what that looks like as the company scales. His advice: “Whatever you do, make sure your compensation shows a balance of humility, fairness with the rest of your team—and the fact that as a founder, you have a big equity stake.” Read the whole column here.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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