Monday, April 14, 2008

Novartis launches startup Forma Therapeutics, seeks CEO

By Ryan McBride

Forma Therapeutics Inc. may become a "who's who" of biotech entrepreneurs, as one founder says, but its backers at a corporate venture capital unit of Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis AG are keeping most details about the startup quiet for now.

Though details on the startup itself are sketchy, Forma is adding workers and investment to help advance its experimental compounds to treat cancer, officials say. Steven Tregay, a managing director of Novartis Option Fund, said that Forma last month raised $4 million in a Series A round of venture capital from his fund and launched an office in Cambridge. He declined to provide details about the startup's technology or which other investors plan to back the firm, however.

"It will definitely be a who's who," said Tregay, whose office is in Cambridge. He said he and other founders of the company are searching for a CEO and a management team to lead Forma.

The biotech startup also appears to have links to Cambridge drug developer CombinatoRx Inc.: Its board of directors includes CombinatoRx founder and CEO Alexis Borisy, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing dated March 18.

Federal documents also show Michael Foley, a scientific founder of CombinatoRx, among Forma's shareholders in the Series A round. Foley is director of chemical biology at The Broad Institute, a genomic research center in Cambridge supported by Harvard University and MIT.

Forma, founded in May 2007, is among a group of local biotech startups to garner investments from the Novartis Option Fund, which got started in 2007 with $200 million from its corporate parent. The fund not only invests in biotechs, it also buys options to certain uses of the firms' technologies.

Locally, Novartis Option Fund has invested in and purchased options from Cambridge biotech startups Cequent Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Ascent Therapeutics Inc. At Cequent, a developer of RNA-interference drugs, the fund spent $3 million to purchase an option to the startup's technology for the treatment of gastrointestinal diseases.

The option fund is part of Novartis Venture Funds, the VC arm of the Swiss pharma, which has offices in Cambridge and Basel, Switzerland. Cambridge is also home to Novartis Institutes of Biomedical Research Inc., a research and development unit of the company, and its vaccines and diagnostics division.

Novartis, which reported 2007 revenue of $38.9 billion, says it employs a total of 2,000 people in Massachusetts.