Pliant Launches in the Bay Area With $45 Million and Former Johnson & Johnson and Celgene Execs At the Wheel
February 18, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Redwood City, Calif.-based Third Rock Ventures, LLC launched a new biotech company, Pliant Therapeutics, Inc., today with $45 million in Series A financing. The company’s focus will be on developing drugs to treat various fibrotic disorders.
Pliant’s science is based on the work of Dean Sheppard, professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, Allergy and Sleep at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Bill DeGrado, professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCSF, Hall Chapman, professor of medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, Allergy and Sleep, also at UCSF, and Bradley Backes, associate professor in the UCSF Department of Medicine.
Bernard Coulie, co-founder and chief executive officer of ActoGeniX, who also spent six years in leadership roles at Johnson & Johnson , will be Pliant’s chief executive officer. Perry Karsen, who recently retired as chief executive officer of Celgene Cellular Therapeutics , will be Pliant’s chairman of the board.
The company’s top focus will be developing a therapy to stop and potentially reverse idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). The mechanisms of the disease are still unidentified, but it causes thickening and scarring of connective tissue in the lungs.
The San Francisco Business Times reports that Foster City, Calif.-based Gilead Sciences Inc. recently ended a mid-stage trial of an experimental IPF drug last month after a data-monitoring committee concluded it wasn’t effective. Also, InterMune Inc. , acquired by Roche in the fall of 2014, markets one of the only two IPF treatments approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Esbriet. Boehringer Ingelheim markets the second drug, Ofev.
But Coulie and the scientific founders of Pliant believe they have the inside track on a drug that inhibits a specific protein connected to a cell type believed to drive fibrosis. Pliant’s compound appears to specifically target transforming growth factor beta (TGF-beta).
“We are solely focused on the mechanism that drives fibrosis,” Coulie told The San Francisco Business Times. “You need to know what your molecular target is. You need to know what kind of target you’re going after.”
If Pliant’s technological approach is effective, it may have applications in cardiac and renal fibrosis, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), Crohn’s disease, and scleroderma.
At the moment Pliant has seven employees, but plans to hire about another 18 by the end of the year.
Sheppard and his fellow scientific co-founders’ research focuses on a family of protein receptors called integrins. Integrins have a significant function in excessive signal activation of TGF-beta. Working with genetic “knock-out” mice, Sheppard and his team managed to delete all members of the integrin family, called alpha V, in animal models, which resulted in the prevention of fibrosis in the lungs, liver and kidneys. Further research has been able to selectively target a subset of TGF-beta activity without shutting everything down.
“We and others are trying to identify targets that can stop the progression of fibrosis,” Coulie told Forbes. “It may be possible even to reverse it, to regress the fibrosis. Not only do we think we can maintain a patient with a certain amount of lung function, but we may be able to help them improve. That’s our goal.”