Flagship Pioneering Launches Microenvironment-Focused Sonata Therapeutics (Updated)

Flagship CEO Noubar Afeyan/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

Flagship Pioneering describes itself as a bioplatform innovation company whose focus is developing and launching cutting-edge companies. Its track record is impressive, with launches including Moderna, Denali Therapeutics, Codiak BioSciences, Sana Biotechnology and numerous others.

Today, Flagship announced the launch of Sonata Therapeutics. The fledgling company was created by combining two Flagship companies, Inzen Therapeutics and Cygnal Therapeutics, building on “each company’s pioneering work characterizing different inputs into the cellular microenvironment and their roles in causing disease, and developing therapeutic strategies based on these insights.”

In an interview with BioSpace, Dr. Volker Herrmann, M.D., formerly CEO of Inzen and now CEO of Sonata, said that after evaluating the two companies, they noted they “shared a strong vision” with “synergies and capabilities” that would lead to a much stronger company working in the under-developed oncology microenvironment space.

The company’s bioplatform leverages proprietary pharmacologic and genetic perturbations, high-throughput and co-culture assays, phenotypic analyses, and machine learning. It currently has six preclinical programs across various cancer indications. It also has very early exploration programs in fibrosis and autoimmune diseases.

“Sonata is taking an exciting and innovative approach to unlocking the enormous value potential of the cellular microenvironment,” said Dr. Doug Cole, M.D., managing partner at Flagship and chairman of Sonata’s board of directors. “It has the scale, technology, and team to translate the longstanding promise of the microenvironment into therapeutics that help patients with serious diseases.”

The company isn’t ready to disclose current finances, but Herrmann said they are “well-positioned financially” and should be able to fund activities through to the end of 2023. It was possible they might consider a financial raise in early 2023.

Out of their six oncology preclinical pipeline products, Herrmann projects that three will move into the clinic by the end of 2023. And hopefully, he said, they expect two or three of the others to enter the clinic by the end of 2024.

Herrmann stated, “Remodeling the microenvironment requires the simultaneous control of a diversity of signals. Sonata Therapeutics’ unique approach harnesses these signals to develop curative treatments for serious diseases. I look forward to overseeing and accelerating Sonata’s growth and its transformative approach to medicine.”

Inzen was unveiled in January 2021. Its founding team included Flagship senior principal and Inzen chief operating officer Jason Park, Ph.D., who had developed a platform leveraging mass spectrometry and machine learning, novel probes and assays, genetic and chemical biological technologies to characterize Thanokine Biology at scale to create drug candidates. As such, it has developed a large Thanokine Biology database. Thanokine Biology, the company stated, was believed to exert “broad and fundamental influence on cell state.” Essentially, living cells process and respond to inputs from dying cells. Its lead programs in oncology were engineered to kill tumor cells and direct Thanokines from the dying tumor to broadly rewire the tumor microenvironment and create a strong immune response.

Cygnal Therapeutics leveraged Exonueral Biology to treat cancer, immunological diseases, and regenerative processes. It was founded by Flagship in 2017. Exoneural biology, the company said, was a novel way of thinking about neural signaling as outside traditional neurobiology. Perhaps an easier description is focusing on the peripheral nervous system as an active participant in health and disease instead of a pipeline for the central nervous system, specifically the brain and the spine. For example, in the case of cancer, cancer cells start to take over neural signals that were previously only thought to be active in neurons.

Pearl Huang, Ph.D., former CEO of Cygnal, recently left the company to pursue new opportunities. She was a founder of BeiGene and a former senior vice president of Roche.

It was only a month ago that Flagship announced it had added three biopharma executives to its stable. Michael Severino, formerly vice chairman and president of AbbVie, joined as a CEO-Partner. On April 11, Flagship brought on Michelle C. Werner as CEO-Partner of Flagship and chief executive officer of Alltrna. Formerly, Werner was Worldwide Franchise Head, Solid Tumors at Novartis Oncology. And on April 7, Margo Georgiadis was joining the company as CEO-Partner. Georgiadis is formerly chief executive officer of Ancestry.com.