Ex-Pfizer Exec to Head Synthetic Biology Company Synlogic
May 21, 2015
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Former Pfizer Inc. executive Jose-Carlos (JC) Gutiérrez-Ramos told BioSpace today he hopes to focus on synthetic biology as a way to “transform the way we cure disease” now that he’s joined Cambridge, Mass.-based Synlogic as president and chief executive officer.
“My top priority is to focus the power of synthetic biology to the development of therapeutics and transform the way we cure disease,” Jose-Carlos (JC) Gutiérrez-Ramos said in an interview with BioSpace. “We are the leading company in generating therapeutic synthetic life, using the trillions of microorganisms (bacteria and viruses that are part of us but they are not us) and modifying them with exquisitely well-controlled genetic programs that sense a disease signal and respond with a therapeutic.”
Prior to his work at Pfizer, Gutiérrez-Ramos served as senior vice president and head of the Immunoinflammation Center for Drug Discovery at GlaxoSmithKline and the chief science officer and site head for Amgen .
Synlogic currently employs 15 people. Funded with $35 million in investments from Atlas Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the company’s focus is developing engineered bacteria and viruses to fight disease.
The company’s technology is built on the research of Jim Collins’ work at Boston University and Tim Lu’s of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Collins work was focused on engineering a probiotic bacterium that could work to kill cholera in the intestines. In 2012 Collins was the recipient of a $100,000 Grand Challenges Explorations grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
So why did Gutiérrez-Ramos jump from Pfizer to Synlogic? “The founders are outstanding scientists and investors: Collins and Lu are exceptional scientists and innovators,” Gutiérrez-Ramos told BioSpace. “Both Atlas’ Barret and NEA’s Mathers are very supportive and visionary. Most importantly, Atlas’ Mahadevia assembled a great team. They have advanced enormously technology and programs in just six months. [It’s a] great culture.”
The typical approach in the field of synthetic biology is to engineer bacteria to produce a byproduct, for example, inserting genes that produce insulin into bacteria, then processing the resulting insulin. Synlogic’s approach, at the moment, is the development of probiotic bacteria that patients would actually ingest.
“Our company has a clear focus on one, therapeutics, and two, non-somatic microorganisms as vectors for therapy,” Gutiérrez-Ramos told Biospace. “We are not into reagent development, biofuels, pigments or many other useful things that SynBio companies do. Our goals in the next five years are to advance two to four programs to the clinic in rare diseases on our own and another two to four with partners in broader indications in the inflammatory and metabolic space.”
The company has indicated it is developing two preclinical candidates. They are engineered for urea cycle disorders and phenylketonuria.
When the Gates Foundation invested $5 million in the company, global health president Trevor Mundel indicated in a statement that “Synlogic’s technology platform could lead to new therapies for some of the most severe diarrheal diseases, the second-leading cause of death for children in developing countries.”
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