Accelerator, Seattle’s best known hotspot for hatching biotech startups, has found its latest idea for a new company on the East Coast.
Most of Accelerator’s investments of the past have come from its West Coast network, but the youngest pup in the litter at the Seattle-based startup machine, Acylin Therapeutics, is based on the vision of a biotech entrepreneur from Boston, and some science from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and The Wistar Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. Acylin is announcing today it has secured an undisclosed Series A venture round (which is typically in the ballpark of $4 million) from the usual suspects who back Accelerator—Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Amgen Ventures, Arch Venture Partners, OVP Venture Partners, PPD, and WRF Capital.
The idea here is that Acylin (pronounced ACE-uh-lin) will make small-molecule drugs aimed specifically at a class of enzyme targets known as histone acetyltransferases. The concept of fighting cancer through this route has been gaining increasing attention in Big Pharma and venture capital, particularly since Cambridge, MA-based Gloucester Pharmaceuticals won FDA clearance of its drug romidepsin for a rare lymphoma last year, and was quickly bought out by Summit, NJ-based Celgene (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CELG]]) in a deal that could be worth $640 million over time. Merck also has an approved drug, vorinostat, in the same class of histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDAC), and Novartis has a candidate in advanced development for cancer called panobinostat.
Acylin’s hope, based on science from the labs of Philip Cole at Johns Hopkins and Ronen Marmorstein at Wistar, is that it will develop more specifically targeted and more potent drugs that work through this pathway against cancer, metabolic diseases like diabetes, and neurodegenerative disorders.
“We are the first company to target this class in a serious way,” says Bard Geesaman, Acylin’s chief technical officer. “The founders have solved a number of 3-D structures, so designing drugs is more straightforward than it was before.”
Biotech is clearly one of those industries built on relationships, and Acylin is no exception to the rule. Accelerator CEO Carl Weissman goes way back with all the key business players here. Back when Weissman was with MPM Capital in 2001, he hired Geesaman as the top technical guy at Cambridge, MA-based Centagenetix, based on a recommendation from stem cell researcher George Daley. Centagenetix was merged into Elixir Pharmaceuticals in 2003, where Weissman got to know chief scientific officer Peter DiStefano. Years later, DiStefano hooked up with one of his former Millennium Pharmaceuticals colleagues, Suresh Jain, who was seeking help in getting his business vision for Acylin off the ground.
Jain, who believed in this company so much that he
