declined to give a timeline, only saying that the company “is committed to advancing the compounds toward the clinic as fast as possible.” Merck will work with Shair’s lab via a research collaboration to move the compounds forward.
The deal is the most lucrative to date for the BBA, which actually began in 2007 as the $10 million Biomedical Accelerator Fund. Its namesake, Access Industries founder and Harvard alum Len Blavatnik, gave Harvard a $50 million gift in 2013 to expand its scope and create the BBA and the Blavatnik Fellowship in Life Sciences Program.
The BBA is meant to address what’s known as the “valley of death,” in which promising projects stall because they are too early to get the financial backing of an investor or pharma company. Universities have come up with a number of different ideas to deal with the problem. For instance, NYU Langone Medical Center, as I wrote last week, has an “office of therapeutics alliances” that leans on partnerships with contract research organizations and input from seasoned advisors to push projects forward. (Nature took an in-depth look at a number of initiatives by universities to reshape tech transfer and engage industry here.)
The BBA is a similar type of effort, aiming to help license research to entities that can develop and ultimately commercialize it. Keith says the accelerator has spent about $10 million on roughly 25 projects since it was formed three years ago. Most are still ongoing.
A few startups have popped up as well. Harvard chemist Andrew Myers used accelerator funding to advance antibiotics research that turned into a startup called Macrolide Pharmaceuticals, which raised a $22 million Series A round a year ago.
The accelerator has also helped turn work from chemical biology professor Tobias Ritter into SciFluor Life Sciences, and research from cell biologists Daniel Finley, Alfred Goldberg, and Randall King into drug candidates now in preclinical development at Proteostasis Therapeutics (NASDAQ: [[ticker:PTI]]).
Shair’s work led to a licensing deal with a big company, rather than the formation of a startup, because the compounds are likely to reach patients faster that way, according to Kohlberg.
Kohlberg says 20 percent of the revenue the BBA generates flows back to it. In time, the idea is to make the accelerator self-sustaining. The big haul from Merck makes that reality more likely, but Kohlberg says the accelerator has a larger mission.
“What drives [our] strategy is not the revenues but to ensure that these opportunities get in the right hands,” he says.
