Ventus Therapeutics, with offices in Waltham, Massachusetts and Montreal, closed on a $60 million Series A rounding led by founding investors Versant Ventures. GV, formerly Google Ventures, participated.
Ventus Therapeutics, with offices in Waltham, Massachusetts and Montreal, closed on a $60 million Series A rounding led by founding investors Versant Ventures. GV, formerly Google Ventures, participated.
Ventus was founded by Harvard Medical School Professor Hao Wu and Yale University Professor Richard Flavell and others, with Marcelo Bigal as chief executive officer and president. Bigal joined Versant as a partner after leaving Purdue Pharma as chief medical officer. Before Purdue, Bigal was with Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and Merck & Co. Wu is Professor, Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard and Senior Investigator of Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Boston Children’s Hospital. Flavell is Sterling Professor of Immunobiology, Yale University and Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
The monies raised are slotted to be used to advance three pipeline programs and expand Ventus’s structural immunology platform. The innate immune system’s inflammasome and nucleic acid sensing pathways are notoriously difficult to target, but Ventus believes its structural immunology platform can do so. The company’s approach leverages protein engineering capabilities and expertise to create and express stable monomers of known targets.
“The know-how and technologies within Ventus provide the opportunity to develop selective small molecule drugs for innate immunity,” Bigal stated. “These capabilities have enabled us to tackle several challenging and disease-relevant pathways. With the backing from Versant and GV, we can now translate our progress into innovative medicines for autoimmune diseases and oncology.”
During the company’s “stealth period,” the founders and the company’s Inception Discovery Engine created the structural immunology platform, screened compounds against multiple targets, and moved into lead discovery. Going forward, Ventus plans to advance the internal pipeline while also evaluating discovery-stage partnerships with outside companies.
Although the company has not specified its targets, Bigal told the Boston Business Journal that the company is interested in lupus, osteoarthritis, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), refractory seizures, cancer and severe asthma, which is indeed a wide-ranging group of indications.
Other companies working on the innate immune system include Trillium Therapeutics and IFM Due, as well as Novartis, which acquired IFM Due’s sister company, IFM Tre, in 2019.
Bigal clearly has ambitions, telling the Boston Business Journal, “Regeneron didn’t start big. Regeneron started by actually having a very unique and defining capability. Biogen didn’t start big, Amgen didn’t start big, Celgene didn’t start big. But they all had something that actually, they could call their own. There’s a lot out there, but we do have something that is ours and only ours.”
In addition to Wu and Flavel, the company’s scientific founders include Judy Lieberman, Endowed Chair in Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School; Thomas Tuschl, Professor and head of the laboratory for RNA molecular biology at the Rockefeller University; Feng Shao, Investigator and Deputy Director for Academic Affairs, National Institute of Biological Sciences, Beijing; Douglas Green, Chair, Immunology and Co-Leader, Cancer Biology Program, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital; and Russell Vance, Professor of Immunology and Pathogenesis at the University of California at Berkeley, and Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
“Ventus is positioned to open up new territory for developing better medicines that target innate immunity pathways behind many important diseases,” said Brendan Bulik-Sullivan, a partner at GV. “We are confident in the experienced leadership team and the scientific expertise that is propelling the company’s drug development.”
