Friday, September 19, 2008

Zafgen gets new CEO, plans to starve fat cells

By Stephen DeSantis

Fresh out of stealth mode, the obesity-focused biotech Zafgen Inc. has hit the ground running. In August, Thomas Hughes, metabolic disease expert with 20 years of industry experience, was announced as Zafgen’s first CEO.

The Waltham-based firm launched in 2005, but received its first cash infusion in 2006 with a $2 million Series A round of financing driven by Atlas Venture. Its big break came in October 2007 when Atlas teamed up with Third Rock Ventures partners Kevin Star and Lou Tartaglia, an obesity researcher once himself, to split a $20 million Series B round for Zafgen.

Hughes said the money was needed to get its potential lead molecules to proof of concept in human subjects. The company expects to begin clinical trials sometime next year, he said.

The company was founded by Maria Rupnick, a cardiologist at Children’s Hospital Boston and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, whose work paved the way for Zafgen’s drug platform.

Zafgen’s mantra is that fat tissue itself is not an innocent participant in obesity and should be looked at as a valid drug target. Its research revolves around manipulating the way fat cells and blood vessels talk to each other.

“Most therapies try to target what we do with the calories we consume. But it turns out that when you gain weight you have an increase in the blood vessels that supply (fat) tissue. When you lose weight those vessels prune away like the small branches of a tree,” said Rupnick. Her research has found approaches to obesity that are akin to anti-angiogenesis drugs in oncology.

Now loaded with discoveries from her lab, the company is aiming its guns at fat cells, or rather the vascular mechanisms that feed the tissue. By disrupting blood and tissue communication, Zafgen’s drugs have been shown to shrink fats cells in preclinical testing.

Prior to joining Zafgen, Hughes spent nearly two decades at Novartis AG, most recently at the Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge as head of its Type 2 diabetes and metabolic drug discovery program. He ran the firm’s overall diabetes and metabolism disease research for seven years.

“As far we know, this is the first approach, apart from liposuction, that is going after that problem directly. It is completely novel and I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t,” said Hughes.

Obesity is one of the few conditions where there are both tremendous market opportunities in term of potential revenue and a self-generated consumer demand, said Andrew Jay, managing partner at Siemens Venture Capital, which has backed local life science firms such as Molecular Insight Pharmaceuticals Inc. and invests heavily in disease management services firms.

“What is interesting about this company’s science is that, in some ways, it mirrors what has been going on in oncology — trying to reduce the blood flow to shrink tumors,” said Jay.