Startup Yumanity Closes on $45 Million, With Biogen and Sanofi-Genzyme BioVentures Joining In
February 10, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Cambridge, Mass.-based Yumanity Therapeutics announced a $45 million Series A financing round today. Led by Fidelity Management & Research Company, participants included Redmile Group, Alexandria Venture Investments, Biogen , Sanofi-Genzyme BioVentures and Dolby Family Ventures.
In addition, John Cox, executive vice president of therapeutic operations at Biogen, and Joel Marcus, chairman, chief executive officer and founder of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc./Alexandria Venture Investments, join the company’s board of directors.
Yumanity was founded by Tony Coles, who is also the chief executive officer and chair. Coles is best known for founding Onyx Pharmaceuticals, which he sold to Amgen for $10.4 billion. Yumanity’s technical foundation is research from Susan Lindquist’s laboratory at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, which focuses on protein misfolding, a key concept in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, and Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).
Coles and Lindquist worked together previously as board members of FoldRx Pharmaceuticals, which was bought by Pfizer in 2010. The two invested their own money in starting Yumanity in 2014, hiring the first 15 employees and various instrumentation needed. Lindquist does not work for the company, but chairs the scientific advisory board.
Of his new investors, Coles told Forbes, “I’d characterize the group as smart money, and money that understands the science behind what we’re trying to accomplish. One of the biggest challenges of the industry is we just don’t understand the biology of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s very well. We’ve got some basic work to do on the basic mechanisms, and then we can train our guns of drug discovery on those mechanisms.”
The company’s early work has been focused on creating its own type of drug discovery engine. As Forbes describes it, “The company uses a yeast-based system to identify promising molecular pathways that appear to go awry in neurodegeneration.”
It also has pulled in induced pluripotent stem cell technologies that allow the company to actually create human neurons in a Petri dish from skin cells collected from patients.
The managing director of Sanofi-Genzyme Bioventures, Bernard Davitian, notes that his firm looks for breakthrough science, areas of unmet medical need, world-class investors and management teams. “Clearly, Yumanity Therapeutics fits this description,” he told Forbes, “and Tony (Coles) is an outstanding leader. We are excited by Yumanity’s new paradigm to transform drug discovery in this area.”
The company plans to use the $45 million to move toward human testing, although Coles is unwilling to provide a timeline. Everyone seems to understand that work in the areas of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease is complicated and will take time. Between 2002 and 2012, only a single drug for Alzheimer’s out of 244 that were in clinical trials made it to market. Some of this is related to a lack of understanding of the fundamental nature of the diseases. Although it appears that beta-amyloid plaque buildup, tau tangles, inflammation and problems in cell trafficking play a role, what those roles are, when they occur and to what extent is still unknown.
“Several things may be going awry,” Coles told Forbes. “We may need combo therapies attacking each of those aspects, and maybe different drugs at different stages of disease.”
Yumanity as yet has no drug to test in the clinic, focusing instead on developing its approach and research engine. It also plans to hire an additional 10 people.
The inclusion of Biogen in the investors is particularly interesting, in that the company has recently made a pivot from its focus on multiple sclerosis towards Alzheimer’s research and development. Coles notes that Biogen’s focus is on developing drugs to cut the accumulation of amyloid in the brain. Yumanity focuses primarily on protein misfolding.
“We’re unbiased and not after a single mechanism unless a cell points in a specific direction,” Coles told the Boston Business Journal. “Biogen started in a presumption that amyloid is important, so if we can clear it, that is a good thing. We’re asking a broader question: What is the way we can treat Alzheimer’s? We’re asking the cell to tell us.”