For the better part of a year, Scholar Rock has worked behind the scenes mapping out an approach to hit well-known disease targets in an unusual way. Now, the nascent Cambridge, MA-based startup is ready to discuss what it’s found.
Scholar Rock is emerging from stealth mode today to make two announcements: First, it’s licensed intellectual property from Boston Children’s Hospital related to what it calls “niche” activators—the new drug candidates it wants to develop against certain types of growth factors. Second, it’s filling out its board of directors with some well-known Boston biotech entrepreneurs: Katrine Bosley, the former CEO of Avila Therapeutics, and Michael Gilman, the former head of Stromedix. They’ll join chairman Amir Nashat of Polaris Partners, co-founder Timothy Springer, and president and CEO Nagesh Mahanthappa (the former vice president of corporate development and operations at Avila).
The two bits of news mark the first time Scholar has come up for air to tell its story since it was co-founded just over a year ago. It’s still an infant company, with about 10 employees (including a few consultants), no drug candidates in clinical trials, a Kendall Square office/lab and seed funding from Polaris and Springer to show for its efforts.
Scholar was formed in January 2012 out of the work of Springer and Leonard Zon, a fellow researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Springer is perhaps best known as the founder of Cambridge-based LeukoSite, which was sold to Millennium Pharmaceuticals for $635 million in 1999, though he’s also been involved in more recent biotech startups in town, like Selecta Biosciences and Moderna Therapeutics.
The concept behind Scholar is to seek out certain specific, seemingly dormant growth factors, and create a drug that indirectly and selectively either turns them on, or keeps them switched off. By doing so, according to Mahanthappa, Scholar could create drugs with higher potency, or fewer side effects (or both), than those with a more “broad” effect on growth factors as a whole.
Growth factors are, of course, very well known in the biotech world. They’re proteins that mediate a number of normal physiological processes like cell growth and differentiation, and are also known to go haywire in the case of various diseases. As such, they’re often used or targeted for therapeutic reasons. Sometimes, for example, the growth factor is made through genetic engineering and given as the drug itself, like in the case of interferons. Other times, growth factors are themselves the biological targets that scientists seek to shut down with targeted antibodies or small molecule chemical compounds.
Mahanthappa says, however, that the vast majority of growth factors have a “wide variety” of roles and exist throughout the body. This means that broadly shutting down those growth factors—with an antibody, for instance—might hit the desired biological target, but might also interfere with other, normal physiological processes.
This is where Scholar comes in. Mahanthappa says all that growth factors aren’t just
