Berkeley biotech\u2019s stem cell rejuvenation platform, built for transplant medicine, is branching into an injectable and a skin treatment. <\/p>\n
A little over a year ago, HexemBio<\/a> was a single-idea company: take a patient\u2019s own aging blood stem cells, briefly place them back in a lab-built version of the environment where the body first made them before birth, and return them rejuvenated. That idea is still the core of the business. However, the San Francisco-based company announced today that it has built two additional products on top of it, backed by $15.5 million in total funding, with new investor Happiness Capital joining existing backers Draper Associates and Boost VC.<\/p>\n HexemBio\u2019s technology is called the Synthetic Human Yolk Sac<\/a>, a lab-recreated version of the developmental environment where a person\u2019s first blood-forming stem cells arise before birth. The company\u2019s approach takes a patient\u2019s own aged stem cells, exposes them briefly to that environment outside the body, then reinfuses them, aiming to restore some of the regenerative capacity those cells had earlier in life. The platform has been published in Nature<\/a>, with additional manuscripts under review, and the company has filed 17 patent applications worldwide, two of which have been granted so far.<\/p>\n The first-generation program built on that technology is a cell therapy aimed at improving outcomes in bone marrow transplants for patients with blood disease, a procedure that remains grueling and, for a meaningful share of patients, doesn\u2019t fully restore normal blood cell production afterward. HexemBio received Orphan Drug Designation for the program in July 2025, completed its pre-IND meeting with the FDA in January 2026, and is targeting first-in-human trials in 2027.<\/p>\n Two new generations, two new bets <\/p>\n This week\u2019s news centers on that first program. A second-generation product is an injectable designed to carry the same developmental signals as the yolk sac environment, without requiring a patient\u2019s cells to be collected and processed outside the body first. It\u2019s aimed at people who could benefit from restored stem cell function but who fall outside the transplant setting altogether, and it\u2019s currently in advanced preclinical development. A third-generation product, aimed at enhancing and protecting skin, is in the final phase of development, with what the company describes as an aggressive go-to-market plan.<\/p>\n \u201cOur first generation product and lead program for transplants is still the main priority to get into human clinical trials for 2027,\u201d said Gabriel Levesque Tremblay, CEO and co-founder of HexemBio. \u201cOur goal is to create accessible therapies that extend healthy years.\u201d<\/p>\n Eric Ng, CEO of Happiness Capital, framed the funding round around a broader mission: \u201cWe are excited by HexemBio\u2019s approach to targeting the foundational drivers of aging, which will help people extend their healthspan and deliver benefits that resonate across generations.\u201d<\/p>\n Draper Associates, the round\u2019s lead investor, has a track record of backing science that sounds more speculative than it turns out to be, with recent bets on artificial wombs and de-extinction alongside earlier stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, Coinbase, Robinhood and Colossal.<\/p>\n \u201cWe invested in HexemBio\u2019s first therapy, and we are thrilled with their progress,\u201d said Tim Draper, founding partner at Draper Associates. \u201cThe team has been outstanding. Their fundamental breakthrough technology has expanded into three new product categories, maybe more to come.\u201d<\/p>\n Blood stem cells as a longevity chokepoint <\/p>\n The transplant application is the most immediately practical of the three, but it\u2019s worth sitting with why a synthetic developmental environment for blood stem cells matters beyond that one procedure. Hematopoietic stem cells, the ones that give rise to every type of blood and immune cell in the body, decline in both number and quality as people age, a shift that\u2019s been linked to weaker immune responses, higher rates of blood disorders, and slower recovery from illness generally.<\/p>\n A platform that can coax those cells back toward a more youthful state, even briefly and even outside the body, is targeting one of the more upstream mechanisms in the aging process rather than treating downstream symptoms of it. HexemBio\u2019s transplant program will be the first real test of whether that idea holds up in a person rather than a dish. If it does, the injectable and skin programs stop looking like separate side bets and start looking like the same underlying discovery, applied to more of the body.<\/p>\n Photograph courtesy of HexemBio. Photograph shows (L\u2013R): Gabriel Levesque Tremblay (CEO and Co-Founder), Mo Ebrahimkhani (CSO and Co-Founder), Samira Kiani (CTO and Co-Founder), Joshua Hislop (AI Lead and Co-Founder) and Samet Yildirim (CBO and Co-Founder). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Berkeley biotech\u2019s stem cell rejuvenation platform, built for transplant medicine, is branching into an injectable and a skin…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":893672,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[64,63,137,500,463071,69608,463072,463073,173031,163380],"class_list":["post-893671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-hexembio","tag-stem-cell","tag-stem-cell-injections","tag-stem-cell-rejuvenation","tag-stem-cell-therapy","tag-uc-berkeley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=893671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/893672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=893671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=893671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=893671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}