Is the sum of two parts greater than the whole?
Flagship Pioneering thinks so.
One of Massachusetts' largest venture capital firms focused on life sciences and biotechnology, Cambridge-based Flagship Pioneering is combining the powers of two of its founding companies — Cogen Immune Medicines and Torque Therapeutics — to create one fully integrated immune medicine company called Repertoire Immune Medicines.
The newly launched clinical-stage biotech company will harness the proprietary immune decoding platforms of Cogen Immune Medicines and the immuno-oncology platforms of Torque Therapeutics to develop novel medicines for the immune system to prevent, treat and cure cancer, autoimmune disorders and other infectious diseases.
Flagship roped in John Cox to lead Repertoire Immune Medicines as the CEO. Cox most recently led Biogen spinoff Bioverativ until its acquisition by Sanofi.
"Imagine a world in which you're able to identify a particular T-cell clone associated with a person's disease," Cox told BostInno. "And you are able to decode these T-cells responsible for the disease and develop drugs. [Flagship] has the technology to do both. It's a very unique set of tools that opens up a vast new array of immune medicines for our industry."
Flagship Pioneering's mission is to originate companies stemming from novel ideas developed under its existing umbrella of biotech and life science research. Cogen Immune Medicines and Torque Therapeutics were based on two separate novel ideas. While Cogen focused on decoding the immune synapse, Torque was using studying whether or not a person's own T-cells could be used to treat diseases.
"Torque and Cogen started collaborating on the tools and realized that it was so obvious that the technologies were fully complimentary," Cox said. "We formed Repertoire at the end of last year and have been integrating the two companies since."
Repertoire Immune Medicines is an integration of Cogen's DECODE discovery platform and Torque's DEPLOY product platform.
The new company has a headcount of 120 professionals who are specialists in immunology, experimental medicine, physics, computational science, material sciences, process engineering, bioengineering, protein design and applied mathematics.
Its ongoing clinical trial is in first dose escalation safety trial with an autologous T-cell product TRQ15-01, using its proprietary platform PRIME & TETHER T-cells in cancer.
The 20-year-old investment firm currently incubates 28 companies spanning across life sciences, biotechnology and sustainable agriculture.
In January, Flagship launched Ohana Biosciences, its first company focused on reproductive medicine with the creation of the industry's first sperm biology platform.
