December 30, 2014
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Former Cambridge, Mass.-based Sarepta Therapeutics Chief Scientific Officer Arthur Krieg has accepted the CEO position with Cambridge, Mass.-based Checkmate Pharmaceuticals. Krieg only worked at Sarepta for six months and was apparently terminated in June.
Sarepta had never had a chief science officer before and sources were quoted as saying the termination had nothing to do with the company’s products, but about “significant disagreements with Sarepta’s executive team about strategy and the pace of the work on new exon-skipping drugs.”
Sarepta focuses on a RNA technology platform that is designed to target different types of RNA. It utilizes phosphorodiamidate morpholino oligomers (PMOs) that are designed to correspond specifically to targeted RNA. They then modulate the target RNA’s function to decrease or increase the production of a protein involved with a specific disease.
In November Sarepta announced it had initiated dosing in a confirmatory study of eteplirsen, the company’s lead exon-skipping therapeutic candidate for the treatment of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). The study is dubbed 4658-301 (PROMOVI).
In October BioSpace reported on troubles Sarepta was having with eteplirsen’s clinical trials. The FDA has asked the company for additional data, including the minimum duration of safety in new patients and MRI data conducted by an independent academic group.
“What is most concerning to us is that FDA has communicated to Sarepta that it found inconsistencies in the dystrophin data as this is key to the NDA,” wrote Yaron Werber, head of the biotech analysis team at Citigroup in a note. “As completion of the NDA is now delayed to mid-2015, there is some risk that the competitive field will shift given that Prosensa will complete its rolling NDA by the year end 2014.”
Checkmate Pharma is more of a mystery, a startup with very little information. Its website, still under construction, describes the company as “developing a new approach for cancer immunotherapy, activating the immune system in a specific manner to recognize and kill tumor cells throughout the body, without harming normal tissues.”
Prior to Sarepta, Krieg was founder of Cambridge-based RaNA Therapeutics, and acted as CEO since 2011. From 2008 to 2011 he was chief scientific officer of Pfizer ’s oligonucleotide therapeutics unit. He has indicated that Checkmate is still in “stealth mode” but it apparently uses an approach similar to Sarepta’s for drugs for cancer immunotherapy.
