Profile: A Bright Start

It’s estimated that less than one percent of biologically active small molecules found in plants and microbes have been captured and understood by science. Lee Chae, PhD ’08 Plant Biology, is dedicated to identifying and elucidating the potential of the remaining 99 percent to benefit human health. 

Chae is the co-founder of Brightseed, a South San Francisco-based biosciences company using its proprietary Forager® AI platform platform to discover the full potential of bioactive compounds and their health benefits at scale. Since its launch in 2017, Brightseed has already mapped more than 7 million plant compounds to human biological targets and forged partnerships with major food and health companies such as Ocean Spray and Pharmavite. The company also recently launched its first business-to-business bioactive product. 

“We are mining chemical diversity and illuminating what we call the ‘dark matter’ out there in the natural world in order to discover, develop, and commercialize bioactive molecules for human health,” says Chae, who also earned his undergraduate degree in Political Science from UC Berkeley in 1990. 

Chae grew up in Fresno, an agribusiness capital, and witnessed alarming changes to the natural habitat over the years. “I wanted to understand how plants are adapting to the increasingly challenging and fast-changing environmental conditions,” he says.

He was drawn to graduate school at Berkeley because, at the time, it was one of the few institutions applying computational techniques to study plants, at scale, as a dynamical system. “There was a great cohort of like-minded scientists and students there at the time trying to pull it all together,” he says. He was a founding member of the Center for Computational Biology, now the Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QB3), and found a mentor in Sheng Luan, the Chancellor's Professor and Chair in the Department of Plant & Microbial Biology. “He was so supportive of my efforts to seek opportunities, data, and experiences to be able to figure out what this discipline can look like in the future,” Chae says.

Over nearly six years as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University’s Carnegie Institution, Chae applied AI to create databases of more than 100 plant species and their chemical outputs that today have more than 700 licensees worldwide. As vice president of R&D at Hampton Creek, he further honed not only his AI tools but also his business skills and met his future Brightseed cofounders, Sofia Elizondo and Jim Flatt. 

Now, serving as Brightseed’s chief technology officer and chief operating officer, Chae divides his time roughly in thirds: with the team enhancing the Forager model; with the process team transforming bench molecules into commercially scalable products and handling related regulatory requirements; and with the company’s board and investors on business strategy and execution.

“We have a couple dozen programs in the pipeline, to address health challenges ranging from sleep and stress to immune support and inflammation,” says Chae. For example, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has granted Brighseed $1.8 million to look for bioactives that target environmental enteric dysfunction in undernourished pregnant and lactating women, with the goal of impacting global birth and infant outcomes.  

“The potential to discover and develop bioactives that positively impact human health is immense,” Chae says. “As one of our investors put it, we’re on the brink of creating a ‘21st-century pharmacy’ rooted in nature.”

Reflecting on his path from academia to industry, Chae notes that scientific accuracy is key. "If there’s a throughline from Berkeley to Carnegie to Brightseed, it’s that experimental rigor and good data are critical,” he says. “You need to be sure that the numbers you’re plugging in are robust and true.”