July 13, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Cambridge, Massachusetts - Decibel Therapeutics announced today that former Biogen executive Steven Holtzman will be the new president and chief executive officer of the company. Kevin Starr, interim chief executive officer, and a partner at Third Rock Ventures, will stay as chairman of the board.
Decibel was founded in October 2015, launched with $52 million raised by Third Rock. Funding was led by Third Rock and joined by GlaxoSmithKline ’s venture arm, SR One. The cofounders include M. Charles Liberman, director of the Eaton-Peabody Laboratories at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Gabriel Corfas, director of the Kresge Hearing Research Institute at the University of Michigan, Ulrich Muller, director of the Dorris Neuroscience Center in San Diego, and Alberg Edge, director of the Tillotson Cell Biology Unit at Mass. Eye and Ear.
The company’s focus is on combining diagnostic tools, biological insights, modeling and therapeutic delivery techniques to develop a pipeline of drugs to target specific hearing-related indications. The initial focus is on pediatric cancer and cystic fibrosis (CF) patients, who often have hearing loss related to the drugs they take. Other areas will include noise-induced hearing loss, hearing loss related to cochlear implants, age-related hearing loss and tinnitus.
Most recently, Holtzman served as executive vice president of corporate development at Biogen. Before Biogen, he was the founder, chief executive officer, and chairman of the board of Infinity Pharmaceuticals . He also had executive roles at Millennium Pharmaceuticals (now Takeda Oncology), and was a founder and board member of DNX Corporation. Holtzman graduated from Michigan State University with a B.A. in philosophy, and a B.Phil. graduate degree in philosophy from Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, where he attended as a Rhodes Scholar.
He is also no stranger to hearing loss, noting that he has some middle-aged hearing loss. “I’m one of the baby boomers who doesn’t hear as well as he used to, has trouble deciphering speech and noise,” he told the Boston Business Journal.
In addition, his sister was born with significant hearing loss. He is also a trustee at Berklee College of Music, where he says he “worries about our young musicians because the exposure they have to music at high volumes.”
But Holtzman also believes it’s a good time to tackle a variety of hearing-related problems. Current treatments generally involve hearing aids and cochlear implants. “The underlying science of hearing has reached a tipping point,” he told the Boston Business Journal. “We are getting our arms around a molecular basis and epidemiology of hearing loss. That’s the point of envisioning a new generation of therapies for hearing disorders.”
So far the company has raised $52 million in series A funding. The company expects to hire 20 more people by the end of this year, and add anywhere from 40 to 60 more in 2017.
The company hopes to push past hearing aids and implants to include drug therapies that use gene-silencing technology RNA interference.
“I’m building out the platform that will allow you to do broad-based drug discovery for multiple indications,” Holtzman told the Boston Business Journal. “If you want to build a sustainable company, you can’t focus on one candidate.”
