Bruce Booth

The teams were well aligned on the partnership’s key goal: getting our technology into Celgene’s cell therapy portfolio to enable new treatments for patients with solid tumors. The Celgene deal team had also been highly motivated to finish the transaction and also very collaborative, with a definite let’s-get-it-done spirit. In The War Room We arrived at the war room and within an hour got Celgene on the phone. We learned that their internal confidentiality firewalls were strong – so strong, in fact, that except for Rob, the deal team we were working with was unaware of the BMS transaction.

In this blog, I want to make the case that artificial intelligence (AI) will make a significant difference in drug discovery over the long run but it’s important to see AI like other big industry shifts such as the genomics revolution of the early 2000’s. The dominant AI approach applied to chemistry problems is machine learning which, at its core, is a statistical method that looks for correlations between something that can be changed e.g. the structure of a molecule, and properties that are measured e.g. potency Applied to drug discovery, machine learning may uncover hidden patterns in existing data but it’s not going to offer creative leaps that go beyond the training data. * Descriptors: how well you can describe the features of your molecule and the protein that it’s interacting with * Data: the amount of relevant, real life data you have to train your machine learning system on

The three assets Novartis will be acquiring include IFM-2427, a clinical-stage systemic NLRP3 inhibitor for an array of chronic inflammatory disorders (e.g., gout, atherosclerosis and NASH); a preclinical gut-directed molecule for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease; and, a preclinical CNS-penetrant molecule to address neuroinflammation. Back in August 2017, BMS acquired IFM’s preclinical STING and NLRP3 agonist programs aimed at enhancing the innate immune response in cancer, for $300M upfront and up to $2B in milestones. After delivering the agonist programs – which enhance the innate stimulation of the immune response – to BMS for cancer back in 2017, the team focused all their attention on blocking innate biology for autoimmune disease. The NLRP3 inflammasome has been a hard to drug but well-validated target for years: human genetics links it to a number of conditions (e.g., NLRP3 mutations are implicated in Muckle-Wells Syndrome and other rare fevers); pharmacological pathway validation exists with broad range of IL-1-related approaches; and lastly, the CRID3/MCC950 tool compound has been out in academic and industry hands for almost a decade helping elucidate more about the approach in preclinical settings.

Arteaus Therapeutics, a biotech company founded by Atlas Venture in 2011, played a critical role in Emgality’s early development, helping it rapidly advance from its first-in-human studies through a randomized, controlled, double-blinded Phase 2 Proof of Concept (PoC) trial in only 30 months. Today we officially complete the story of Arteaus with the monetization of the last piece of remaining value: the sale of the royalty interest on future global net sales of Emgality to Royalty Pharma for $260M (link). Back in July 2011, after nearly a year of working with Lilly on the spinout structure, we closed on a 3-tranche $18M Series A round (link) led by my partner Jean-François Formela, along with our friends at OrbiMed, to advance what was then called “LY2951742” (galcanezumab) through its early clinical testing. Dave became a partner at Atlas in May 2014; Arteaus’ CSO Scott Chapel went on to help start Surface Oncology; and, Head of Clinical Development Steve Sweeney is now leading clinical operations at Rodin Therapeutics (and worked with several other Atlas companies in the interim, including Annovation and Quartet), as examples.