October 23, 2014
By Riley McDermid, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Up and coming biotech Quartet Medicine today announced a Series A funding round of $17 million from financing by Atlas Venture with Novartis Venture Funds, Pfizer Venture Investment and Partners Innovation Fund.
As part of the deal, Henry Skinner from Novartis Venture Funds will now join Quartet’s board of directors.
Cambridge, Mass.-based Quartet said it plans to use the funding to advance its lead program targeting the modulation of tetrahydrobiopterin (BH4) synthesis by taking its research to human subjects.
“Human genetics and clinical biomarker data implicate a role for BH4 pathway up-regulation in neuronal excitability and on immune cell activity after nerve injury,” said Quartet co-founder Clifford Woolf in a statement. “New treatments that safely restore BH4 levels at the nexus of the peripheral nervous system and the immune system have potential to address the tremendous unmet need faced by patients with chronic pain.”
Quartet was co-founded in late 2013 by Kevin Pojasek, who was then an entrepreneur-in-residence at Atlas Venture along Woolf, who had previously held positions at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, and Kai Johnsson, of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). The three agreed to launch a biotech startup in order to further explore the therapies provided by understanding BH4’s role in chronic pain and inflammation.
Quartet’s primary research focuses on how to regulate BH4 synthesis. Injury or inflammation increases cellular levels of BH4, an important co-factor for several classes of enzymes, resulting in neuronal hypersensitivity and chronic immune cell activation.
Thus far, multiple human genetic studies have shown a link between a haplotype in the gene encoding GTP cyclohydrolase I, a BH4 synthetic enzyme, and a reduced risk of developing chronic pain after nerve injury or chronic disease.
Quarter hopes to develop a drug that will modify either GTP cyclohydrolase I or sepiapterin reductase, another enzyme in the BH4 synthesis pathway, in an effort to restore BH4 to normal levels leading to an improvement of pain symptoms in preclinical models.
The venture capitalist involved said they were proud to be getting in on the ground floor of such promising research.
“Atlas Venture is proud to be leading this strong syndicate of investors after providing seed capital to support the formation of Quartet and to achieve early target validation,” said Bruce Booth, chairman of Quartet and partner at Atlas Venture. “We are capitalizing on recent advances in human genetics that are revealing new mechanisms and, ultimately, novel targets for drug discovery and development in the challenging and underserved therapeutic area of chronic pain.”
