As part of a portfolio update, Altas Ventures noted that Raze Therapeutics, a biotech launched in 2014, has closed its doors.
As part of a portfolio update, Atlas Venture noted that Raze Therapeutics, a biotech launched in 2014, has closed its doors—if it had doors. Kristen Margeson, with Atlas Venture, told BioSpace, “Raze was actually shut down at the end of 2015 and did not actually have ‘doors’ to shut as it was incubating at Atlas.”
Raze closed a $24 million Series A financing in October 2014. Investors included Atlas Venture, MPM Capital Management, MS Ventures, Partners Innovation Fund, Astellas Venture Management and Novartis. It was co-founded by Atlas Venture’s Peter Barrett, as part of the venture firm’s seed financing strategy.
That strategy, as Atlas described in a 2013 blog post, which was recently reviewed, “takes nascent substrate around new drug discovery platforms or therapeutic assets and incrementally but materially derisks them before committing significant capital and reserves. This derisking process is a ‘search for signal’—what can we glean about the underlying science/technology/asset, the founding team, and the market’s responsiveness to the concept that gives us the confidence to press forward.”
The focus of the company was to develop a new class of drugs for cancer that targeted mitochondrial one-carbon (1C) metabolism. Brittany Meiling, writing for Endpoints News, noted, “The space has emerged recently as a major driver of cancer proliferation, survival, and biomass accumulation. But apparently the tech was too tough to continue.”
“Although it made intriguing progress, the underlying cancer metabolism biology was too complicated to warrant further investment,” said Bruce Booth, an Atlas partner, in the firm’s recent portfolio update.
Raze wasn’t the only seed company in the Atlas portfolio to hit a snag. Booth also noted Quartet Medicine was recently shuttered, and Numerate, which is doing well, but took a different approach. In the case of Quartet, Booth wrote, “their once-promising neuropathic pain program hit an unmitigatable preclinical safety issue in August 2017 … that led to the recent shutdown of the company.”
He wrote of Numerate, “This one is not a failure at all, as this cool artificial intelligence-led drug discovery software startup continues to deliver. But they’ve done so with a different, more service/collaboration business model than our drug discovery platform thesis (so Atlas went passive).”
Atlas is supporting a new startup, called Kyn Therapeutics, that works in a related though not identical space. Today the company launched with a $49 million Series A raise funded by Atlas and OrbiMed. Kyn is focused on immunometabolism. Kyn has its own assets, including a clinical-stage program expected to enter the clinic in 2018. The company states that, “Each Kyn Therapeutics candidate is designed to reverse the effects of an immunosuppressive metabolite promoted by cancer cells, and therefore complement or enhance the outcomes achieved by checkpoint inhibitor therapies.”
“The promise of immunometabolism lies in overcoming the barriers cancer creates against treatment, and we are very excited about the opportunities we’ve created by harnessing compelling research in this area,” said Mark Manfredi, Kyn’s chief executive officer, in a statement. “Our preclinical research has delivered exciting results both in single agent studies and in combination with leading checkpoint inhibitors and other mechanisms. We are moving rapidly to launch a clinical oncology study in 2018.”
Manfred was the chief scientific officer of Raze, and is entrepreneur-in-residence at Atlas. He told Meiling that Raze still had assets and collaborations, but no longer employed anyone. She writes, “According to Booth Raze’s scientific assets went back into academia for further exploration.”
Kyn Therapeutics’ lead program focuses on Kynase, an enzyme that breaks down kynurenine directly, which affects both IDO and TDO-related immunosuppression. The second program blocks immunosuppression regulated by the aryl hydrocarbon receptor. Its most clinically advanced program is ARY-007, which blocks the EEP4 receptor, involved in the prostaglandin E2 pathway. As was the case with Raze, Kyn is addressing complex pathway in immunology and metabolism. Of the money raised, $21 million is allocated to Arrys Therapeutics for the ARY-007 program.
