December 30, 2015
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
SAN FRANCISCO – Solstice Biologics, which is developing RNAi therapeutics, has quietly raised $4 million from two investors and also appears to be under new management, according to a regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The filing shows Solstice appears to have quietly acquired a new chief executive officer. The filing lists Corey Goodman as the company’s new CEO, less than 18 months after Lou Tartaglia assumed the leadership role for Solstice. Tartaglia came to Solstice after serving as a partner at Third Rock Ventures, where he helped develop several portfolio companies. He also served as a senior vice president at Gene Logic and served as a vice president of metabolic diseases at Millennium Pharmaceuticals. But now Tartaglia is “temporarily retired,” according to a post on his LinkedIn page, MedCity News News reported this morning. According to his LinkedIn page, Tartaglia left Solstice in June, one year after taking over the helm of that company. Although his LinkedIn page does show him as being “temporarily retired,” he has taken on a new position. MedCity News reported Tartaglia has been appointed CEO of 5am Ventures’ incubator, the 4:59 Initiative. In his new role, Tartaglia will be helping launch new biotech and pharmaceutical companies.
Solstice did not publicize the departure of Tartaglia nor Goodman’s ascension to the top of the company. In fact, the last press release on the company’s website is dated Nov. 17, 2014, touting the publication of an article on RNAi therapeutics in the publication “Nature Biotechnology.” Its management page only lists two executives, Curt Bradshaw, the chief science officer, and John Borgeson, the chief financial officer.
There is also no indication of what the company plans to do with the $4 million it received in this latest round of funding.
Solstice has raised funds at least two other times, $7.5 million in October of 2014 and $18 million in 2013. The 2013 round of funding was led by venBio and Aeris Capital AG.
The San Francisco-based company is figuring out how to get RNAi-based drugs to cross multiple cell types to treat different kinds of tissues. RNA Interference (RNAi) is an evolutionary conserved cellular mechanism to inhibit gene expression by targeting the mRNA of a given gene in the cytoplasm prior to its translation by ribosomes into a protein, Solstice said on its website. Solstice Biologics is attempting to develop the next generation of RNAi triggers, called siRNNs. siRNNs directly and uniquely address both the delivery and stability problems of RNAi therapeutics.
