Thursday, December 15, 2011

Ember Therapeutics launches with $34M of Third Rock's cash

By Rodney Brown

Boston venture capital firm Third Rock Ventures LLC has officially launched a new biotech focused on metabolic disorders and obesity, feeding it $34 million in a Series A round and renaming it Ember Therapeutics.

Initially established in September 2010, according to the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s website, the company was called Adipothermics Inc. The founders include Bruce Spiegelman, professor of cell biology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, who is chairman of the scientific advisory board; Patrick Griffin, chairman and professor of the department of molecular therapeutics at The Scripps Research Institute, Scripps Florida; and Dr. C. Ronald Kahn, professor of medicine at the Joslin Diabetes Center and Harvard Medical School.

In charge of the company, as president and interim CEO is Lou Tartaglia of Third Rock. His background includes roles including senior vice president and general manager of GeneLogic; vice president of new ventures at Millennium Pharmaceuticals; and vice president of metabolic diseases at Millennium. Before joining Millennium, he worked at Genentech on tumor necrosis factor receptors, according to the Ember Therapeutics website. Also helping lead Ember Therapeutics is COO Michael E. Solomon, most recently the chief business and technology officer for Link Medicine Corp., a Cambridge biotech focused on neurology.

Ember Therapeutics is specifically focusing on what it terms “recent breakthroughs in understanding the mechanisms of selective insulin sensitivity,” and on the biology of what is called the good body fat, or brown fat. Brown fat burns calories while white fat stores calories. According to Tartaglia, the area of brown fat is the one in which the company will be working on multiple pathways to the clinic.

“We are developing multiple programs in that space, both biologics and small molecules,” Tartaglia said. “This has come from very recent discoveries made by our scientific founders and board members. What we are essentially trying to do is augment the brown fat in adult humans so that they can burn off excess calories.”

Tartaglia said that Ember’s founders found both biologics (large molecules) that augment the existing brown fat in adult humans, and have identified pathways that can be affected by specific drugs (small molecules) to encourage the function and growth of brown fat. And enhancing the brown fat isn’t just about reducing obesity, but about controlling and preventing diabetes, he said.

“What we have found that augmenting brown fat in pre-clinical models has an even greater effect on diabetes than we expected,” Tartaglia said. “It has a benefit because of weight loss, but there is even a greater effect than just from the weight loss.” That likely comes from the greater efficiency from brown fat at using blood glucose, he surmised.

In the area of selective insulin sensitivity, Tartaglia said that Ember Therapeutics will be working on discoveries by the founders that showed that you can get the same anti-diabetic effects as current therapies without the associated side effects like weight gain or toxicities like edema, by focusing just on the blocking mechanism of a key nuclear hormone receptor, instead of current therapies that both block it and agonize it.

For now, Ember Therapeutics is located in the same Newbury Street address in Boston as Third Rock. The company will remain mostly virtual for the near term, Tartaglia said, eventually having a roster of six senior executives and contracting most research. It will move to another Boston location next month, but he couldn’t say where as lease negotiations are ongoing. Once the company has grown to the point it needs wet lab facilities, Ember will likely look to move to Cambridge, Tartaglia said.

Third Rock is the only investor in the $34 million round, Tartaglia said, but the company is in talks with other potential syndicate investors that would add on to the round. But the company may not need that for some time.

“The $34 million will take us into the clinic in both the insulin sensitivity area and the brown fat area,” Tartaglia said.