Atavistik Bio has been "millions of years" in the making, or so the story goes for the disease pathways that have evolved in that time for the preclinical biotech to match this with its own milllions, $60 million to be exact.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Atavistik emerged with a series A to tackle metabolic diseases and cancers on Tuesday. At the helm are former Peloton Therapeutics and Blueprint Medicines executives and scientific founders from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
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The financing should last about three years as the biotech works to advance at least one program to candidate selection within that timeframe, said acting CEO John A. Josey, Ph.D., in an emailed statement to Fierce Biotech.
"We are just one month into setting up our operation and it is very difficult to project the pace we will be able to set," Josey said. "It's too early to say which specific diseases the biotech will tackle, but the broad spaces of oncology and metabolic diseases are on tap," the CEO said.
The funds will bankroll a drug development platform that focuses on allosteric control mechanisms, which is powered by nature's own evolution over millions of years. That long, long, long history of evolution sets Atavistik up for identifying "non-obvious regulatory sites for disease relevant proteins," he added.
Allosteric control entails regulating the activity of a protein by attaching a ligand, or effector molecule, to a site other than the enzyme's active site. Allosteric is Greek for "other site."
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If this sounds familair, it's because Nimbus Therapeutics is on the same path, banking a $105 million financing round last month to take its own allosteric inhibitor through a series of phase 2 trials.
Atavistik is getting started with Josey and Marion Dorsch, Ph.D., who is serving as president and chief scientific officer. Josey was CEO of Keytruda-challenger Peloton Therapeutics until it sold to Merck for $1.1 billion in the days leading up to a planned IPO in May 2019.
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Dorsch meanwhile was previously CSO at Blueprint Medicines, a role she held for nearly five years. During her tenure at Blueprint, the biotech picked up its first drug approval, for kinase inhibitor Ayvakit. That quick-to-market experience is pivotal to the company's foundation, said board member Tim Kutzkey, in a statement.
The drug won the FDA green light in January 2020 for patients with a specific type of stomach cancer. Ayvakit didn't have much luck on its second indication, though, as it was denied an FDA nod four months later for patients with gastrointestinal stromal tumors.
Now at Atavistik, Dorsch will build upon the tech developed by Jared Rutter, Ph.D., a biochemistry professor out of the University of Utah. Rutter co-founded the biotech with Ralph DeBerardinis, M.D., Ph.D., a professor at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and a medical geneticist.