Maureen
Hillenmeyer

Somewhere in a refrigerator at Hexagon Bio sits a strain of engineered yeast that, given the right genetic instructions, will quietly manufacture a molecule a fungus first invented millions of years ago. That is the whole bet. Maureen Hillenmeyer founded the company on a simple, stubborn idea: the chemistry that could become tomorrow's cancer drug is already written down. It is just written in genomes nobody has read closely.

Today she runs that company as founder and CEO from an office on O'Brien Drive in Menlo Park. Hexagon Bio downloads the publicly available genome sequences of microbes and fungi, runs software across hundreds of thousands of them, and looks for the genetic fingerprints of small molecules with the shape and behavior of a drug. The promising ones get stitched into yeast on a platform the company calls HEx, short for heterologous expression, which coaxes the yeast to biosynthesize the molecule so chemists can finally hold the thing in their hands.

The targets are serious: cancer and infectious disease. The method is almost cheeky. Fungi spent eons evolving toxins to fight their neighbors, refining each compound under relentless pressure. Hexagon treats that long evolutionary contest as a research budget it never had to pay for, and reads the results off the page.

It is a contrarian place to plant a flag. For years the pharmaceutical industry drifted away from natural products toward synthetic libraries and designed molecules, partly because the old discovery process was so slow and so dependent on luck. Hillenmeyer's wager is that the slowness was a tooling problem, not a dead end - that the molecules were always worth having and the field simply lacked the computational means to find them efficiently. Hexagon is built to prove the molecules were never the bottleneck.

Hillenmeyer grew up near Indianapolis, in a household pointed at computers. The interest in technology arrived early and never quite left. What is less expected is how she got to the lab: the University of Notre Dame recruited her as a competitive swimmer. She majored in biology, took computer science on the side, and - in the kind of move that explains the rest of her career - started writing basic programs to analyze large piles of DNA sequencing data.

That was around the time the Human Genome Project was being completed. Sequence data was suddenly everywhere and largely unexamined. She had landed at the exact intersection where biology was becoming a data problem, and she had already taught herself both halves of the language.

She went on to Stanford for a Ph.D. in biomedical informatics, then stayed as a postdoc in a lab focused on discovering and engineering natural products. There the central idea of Hexagon crystallized: improve the centuries-old hunt for natural medicines by adding computation, downloading every genome you can find and letting software prioritize the ones most likely to encode something a patient could use.

Before the company, she directed the Genomes to Natural Products program at the Stanford Technology Genome Center, leading the bioinformatics and synthetic biology that would later become Hexagon's engine. In 2017 she and three co-founders spun the research out into a private company built to actually make drugs.

The jump from academic program to drug company is its own kind of athletic event. A university lab can publish a clever method and call it a win. A company has to turn that method into a pipeline, a payroll, and a pitch that institutional investors will fund through years of unglamorous bench work. Hillenmeyer made that jump and kept making it - growing the team, raising successive rounds, and holding the company to a goal measured not in papers but in molecules that might one day reach a clinic.

For most of pharmaceutical history, the great drugs were found, not designed. Penicillin came from a mold. Many of the world's antibiotics and cancer compounds trace back to microbes and fungi that evolved them as weapons and signals. The catch was always discovery: you had to grow the organism, hope it produced the molecule under lab conditions, and stumble onto the useful ones. Most of that chemistry stayed silent, locked in genes the organism never switched on in a dish.

Hillenmeyer's insight reframes the bottleneck. The genome holds the blueprint whether or not the organism ever expresses it. If you can read the DNA, you can predict the molecule, and if you can predict the molecule, you can build it in a friendlier host. That is why the fungal kingdom is the hunting ground - it is vast, ancient, and chemically inventive - and why yeast is the workhorse. Yeast is cheap, fast, and well understood, the lab equivalent of a reliable old truck.

It also explains the shape of the company she built. Hexagon Bio is deliberately interdisciplinary, blending data science, genomics, synthetic biology, and automation under one roof. Hillenmeyer's own resume - a biologist who codes, an informatician who runs a wet lab - is the company in miniature. The co-founding team reflects the same width: chemist and chemical-engineering professor Yi Tang, computational thinker Brian Naughton, and natural-products scientist Colin Harvey. Few drug-discovery efforts ask all of those people to share a hallway.

The payoff she is chasing is leverage. Instead of screening compounds one slow assay at a time, the platform lets computation do the first pass across a scale no human team could read by hand - hundreds of thousands of genomes - and reserve the expensive bench work for candidates the software already likes. It is drug discovery reorganized around the cheapest thing in modern biology: sequence data.