Two Bay Area Startups Win Amgen's Golden Ticket Award
June 23, 2016
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
SAN FRANCISCO – Things have become golden for two Bay Area startups, Mission Bio and SiteOne Therapeutics, which are the two latest winners of the Amgen Golden Ticket awards, which provides laboratory space at the QB3@953 life sciences incubator.
Amgen provided two Golden Tickets to the startups, as well as inking a five-year sponsorship of the QB3@953 life sciences incubator to “accelerate the development of new therapies to improve human health.”
The shared laboratory space at QB3@953 was created to help high-potential life science and biotech startups overcome a key obstacle for many early stage organizations - access to laboratory infrastructure. Under the award, both companies receive one year of lab space at the incubator, as well as additional facility benefits and connections to Amgen's scientific and business leaders.
Amgen said the 2016 Amgen Golden Ticket winners, Mission Bio and SiteOne Therapeutics, were selected after a steering committee evaluated “the strength and novelty of the scientific rationale, subject matter expertise and business plan viability.”
"The QB3@953 Amgen Golden Ticket award supports our research and development strategy to fund early-stage innovation in the biotech hubs of San Francisco and Cambridge, Massachusetts," Flavius Martin, vice president of research, inflammation and oncology at Amgen, said in a statement. "It's critical to the future of healthcare to support promising scientific entrepreneurs. It's rewarding to be part of the energy and enthusiasm of scientific entrepreneurs in this early stage, and to help accelerate the momentum of advancements in human health."
With proprietary microfluidic droplet technology, Mission Bio is developing research tools that allow high-throughput, single-cell nucleic acid characterization across a variety of research applications, including oncology and immunology. Charlie Silver, chief executive officer of Mission Bio, said the Amgen Golden Ticket award will accelerate his company’s development of high throughput single-cell genomic applications in immuno-oncology.
SiteOne's therapeutic candidates are highly-selective sodium ion channel 1.7 (Na?1.7) inhibitors patterned on naturally occurring small molecules. With the critical role sodium ion channel 1.7 plays in pain signals, SiteOne is focused on advancing its lead product candidates for the treatment of moderate to severe pain. John Mulcahy, co-founder and vice president of research at SiteOne Therapeutics, hailed the Golden Ticket as an opportunity to advance the development of novel therapeutics for chronic and acute pain without the danger and side effects of opioids.
The move-in-ready laboratory space at QB3@953 is designed to suit early-stage-startups, complete with the latest equipment available to use immediately.
Amgen also supports the LabCentral incubator adjacent to Amgen's Cambridge Research and Development center.
Amgen is not the only company to utilize the Golden Ticket concept. In March, Bristol-Myers Squibb inked a deal with LabCentral to support the launch two new life sciences and biotech companies in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Mass.