Two years after Peloton Therapeutics was acquired by Merck & Co. Inc. (NYSE: MRK), Peloton CEO John A. Josey is leading a new startup called Atavistik Bio, based on technology out of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Utah.
Josey is acting CEO of the Cambridge-based company, having led a $60 million Series A investment through The Column Group, the venture capital firm where he is now a venture partner. He is working closely with chief scientific officer Marion Dorsch, a veteran of Novartis AG (NYSE: NVS), Sanofi (Nasdaq: SNY) and Agios Pharmaceuticals Inc. (Nasdaq: AGIO), as well as Blueprint Medicines (Nasdaq: BPMC), where she also held the chief scientific officer position.
"I was able, through my focus over the last 10 years, really to advance six novel therapies and their approval for patients," Dorsch said. "I feel like I'm in the perfect place now to really start Atavistik and do that over again with a new team and a very exciting technology."
But Josey is looking past the technology itself to the insights that could be gleaned from it — and the drugs that could be discovered and developed as a result. Atavistik's platform enables scientists to identify how metabolites, molecules involved in metabolic processes, interact with proteins. That in turn would allow scientists to discern how those molecules could regulate certain metabolic enzymes, which has implication for cancer treatment as well as metabolic diseases.
Atavistik's team expects to develop drugs for those two disease areas themselves. Beyond that, the platform could be used in neurological and immune diseases, but for those areas, Atavistik would partner with other biotech firms, Josey said.
The startup currently has just five people on board, with another four joining next month. By the end of the year, with the help of the funding from The Column Group, LUX Capital and Nextech Invest, Atavistik will have expanded to about 20.
Josey expects the cash runway will be sufficient for about three to four years, about the same timeline the team is allowing for preclinical development.
"I would say, in the best case, we aspire to reach the point where we have discovery programs and we're contemplating moving into the clinic within the first three years," Josey said. "That's a pretty tall order."
An earlier version of this story listed the incorrect university from which Atavistik's technology is based.
