Fate Therapeutics has been quiet during a down time for the stem cell business, but now it’s making news by luring a big name into its inner management circle.
Bill Rastetter, the CEO of Idec Pharmaceuticals during its long journey to develop the blockbuster lymphoma drug rituximab (Rituxan), has agreed to become the chairman and interim CEO at San Diego-based Fate Therapeutics. Besides being CEO of Fate, Rastetter will remain busy wearing his other hats as a partner at Venrock Associates (an investor in Fate), and through his work as chairman of Illumina (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ILMN]]), Neurocrine Biosciences (NASDAQ: [[ticker:NBIX]]), and Receptos.
But the new job at Fate, Rastetter says, will be “my major time commitment.” Fate’s executive chairman, John Mendlein, will now become the vice chairman of the board, and will oversee “scientific excellence” at the company as the chairman of the scientific advisory board, Rastetter says. Mendlein is also executive chairman and CEO of San Diego-based aTyr Pharma. Mendlein replaced Fate’s previous CEO, Paul Grayson, who left the company in February.
“We snagged an industry legend to take Fate that much closer to patient reality,” Mendlein said via e-mail. “Bill has done what few have done before – start and create a biotech to deliver one of the most important medicines today.”
Stem cells have excited scientists for years because of their ability to morph into virtually any type of cell in the body, raising the potential for regenerative medicines against a wide variety of today’s untreatable diseases. Still, no pharmaceutical company has brought forward an FDA-approved medicine based on embryonic stem cells, and drug companies haven’t shelled out big bucks to form alliances with startups working on these types of therapies, or to use the technology to improve the drug discovery process. Last month, a bellwether of the field, Menlo Park, CA-based Geron (NASDAQ: [[ticker:GERN]]) said it was getting out of the stem cell business altogether so it could focus on cancer drug development.
None of that seemed to deter Rastetter.
“Fate reminds me a lot of Idec back in the early antibody days,” Rastetter says. “I’ve always been very intrigued by new technologies deployed at the right time. I think stem cells are here to stay, and now is the time to invest in them. I’m very excited about the scientific and commercial opportunity here. There’s a passion and cohesion here with the team. I feel energized when I sit down with these guys.”
Fate was founded in 2007 to capitalize on leading-edge stem cell science at Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Washington, and The Scripps Research Institute. It has raised more than $50 million in venture capital from a group of VCs that includes Arch Venture Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, OVP Venture Partners, and Venrock, as well as Takeda Ventures, Astellas Venture Management, Genzyme Ventures, and one more unnamed company.
Fate announced the addition of Rastetter a day after it released some preliminary clinical trial results from its lead drug candidate, Prohema, formerly known as FT-1050. Instead of injecting embryonic stem cells into the body and hoping they will morph properly into a desired cell type, this program is designed to be much less risky, by operating in a controlled lab environment. The company uses a small molecule to treat umbilical cord blood in a laboratory, in order to coax it to produce more blood-forming stem cells that can then be transplanted into leukemia and lymphoma patients. Many patients with those blood cancers get intense chemotherapy or radiation that wipes out both their cancer and their blood cells, so researchers are constantly looking for safe and effective ways to reconstitute a patient’s bone marrow and immune system.
The data is from a small study, although it suggests
