Thursday, May 15, 2008

Fate finds new executive chairman in Mendlein

Less than a year from the sale of his Massachusetts life sciences firm, John Mendlein has been named executive chairman of biotech startup Fate Therapeutics Inc.

Fate, which has offices in Boston, San Francisco and Seattle, also revealed that it has hired Paul Grayson, a former managing director of Sanderling Ventures in San Diego, to be the young firm's first CEO. Grayson will be based in San Diego, but all of the other labs and offices will remain in operation, said company spokesman Sam Butler.

Mendlein was CEO of Waltham-based Adnexus Therapeutics Inc. from May 2005 to October 2007, when New York drug company Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. bought the biotech firm in a deal worth more than $500 million, according to Fate. Earlier in his career, he served as a senior executive of Aurora Biosciences Corp., a San Diego biotech firm acquired by Cambridge drug developer Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. in 2001 for $592 million.

Founded in early 2007, Fate last year closed a $15 million Series A round of venture capital financing from such blue-chip backers as Polaris Venture Partners of Waltham. Its scientific founders include David Scadden, a director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and Leonard Zon, director of the stem cell program at Children's Hospital Boston, among others.

The firm aims to develop chemical-based, or small molecule, drugs intended to "awaken" stem cells in the body to combat diseases and regenerate tissue. Its other molecules would reprogram adult cells to an embryonic state. None of the firm's treatments would be derived from embryonic stem cells, the company says.