"Yumanity raises $45 million to fight near diseases" by Robert Weisman Globe Staff February 10, 2016
Yumanity Therapeutics chief executive Tony Coles said his company will use the money to fuel its early-stage research into new compounds to fight such conditions as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Yumanity Therapeutics chief executive Tony Coles said his company will use the money to fuel its early-stage research into new compounds to fight such conditions as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Yumanity Therapeutics, a 15-month-old Cambridge startup developing treatments for neurodegenerative diseases, Wednesday said it has secured $45 million in funding.
Financial backers include institutional investors such as Boston’s Fidelity Management & Research Co. and strategic investors like Cambridge biotech company Biogen Inc. and Sanofi-Genzyme BioVentures, an arm of the rare-disease drug maker.
Tony Coles, chief executive of Yumanity, said his company will use the money to fuel its early-stage research into new compounds to fight such conditions as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Those diseases have been viewed as among the most difficult targets in the field of drug discovery.
Coles said Yumanity’s scientists are housed in the Science Hotel, an office and lab complex behind the old Polaroid headquarters on Memorial Drive. They are working on the premise that, while each neurodegenerative disease is different, misfolded proteins are a common thread.
“We’re still learning a lot about these diseases,” Coles said in an interview. “Some of the insight we’ve gained about the role of misfolded proteins will guide our discovery. We’ve have uncovered a number of ways in which we can represent the cellular causes of these diseases in our models. The good news is we’re encouraged by what we see. We’ll just follow the science.”
Coles, a veteran biotech executive who has worked in Cambridge and the San Francisco Bay Area, said Yumanity is testing drug compounds on its models, which are yeast cells and nerve cells derived from human stem cells.
“If any of the compounds look promising, we’ll try to get them into the clinic and test them on patients,” he said. But he declined to outline a timetable.
Yumanity was initially self-funded by Coles and scientific founder Susan Lindquist, a member of the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It also drew seed money from Redmile Group LLC, a San Francisco investment firm. The company now has about 20 employees, mostly scientists and researchers, and expects to add about 10 this year.
Coles was formerly chief executive at Onyx Pharmaceuticals Inc., a California biotech that was acquired by Amgen in 2013 for $10.5 billion. He returned to the Boston area late in 2014 after running commercial operations at Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. in Cambridge earlier in his career.
“I’m certainly no stranger to the Boston biotech scene,” he said, talking about the expanding industry hub. “But the scale of what’s happening since I last worked here just blows my mind. There are streets in Cambridge that I don’t recognize anymore.”
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