A small piece of the multibillion-dollar restructuring at Pfizer has a light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s in Boulder, CO.
Just a few months after research operations ended at the home of Array BioPharma, the small molecule drugmaker that Pfizer bought for $11.4 billion in 2019, some former employees already have a new home: Ambrosia Biosciences.
The Colorado biotech emerged on Tuesday with the initial close of a $16 million Series A to discover and test new oral small molecules for obesity. It has about 15 former Array employees and plans to move into a lab in the fourth quarter, president and founder Nick Traggis told Endpoints News.
Kyle LefkoffBoulder Ventures and BVF Partners led the Series A, which could grow to about $25 million, according to an SEC filing from this week. Boulder Ventures founding partner Kyle Lefkoff serves as chair of Ambrosia. He co-founded Array in 1998.
“The piece that I’m most excited about and proud of is the fact that we’re able to take what is generally bad news for our local community here in Colorado, the shutdown of this employer, and turn it into a positive where, hey, we’re able to find a place for folks to land and do something really cool and interesting,” Traggis said. “I would hope and suspect that we’ll see other stories like this come out of that team over time.”
Endpoints reported on April 22 that Pfizer was ending research operations at a site in Boulder. At the time, Pfizer declined to disclose how many employees it was laying off and did not provide specific numbers in a WARN notice a month later, either.
“We, being insiders in the community, caught wind that that was likely to happen, so we did a seed round and founded this company in March, got up in front of much of that team and was like, ‘Hey, we’re not saying when, but if this happens, we’re here and ready for you, and we’d love to put this band back together,'” Traggis said.
Within weeks after Pfizer announced the cull, Traggis said Ambrosia was able to pull together “15 of the top-of-the-class medicinal chemists and biologists.” Its chief scientific officer, John Mayer, has held research scientist stints at Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, two of the driving forces in the obesity drug revolution.
Food of the gods
First-generation injectable obesity drugs have spurred what could become the largest pharmaceutical market in history. But the two leading behemoths, Lilly and Novo, are already studying new types of obesity and diabetes drugs, as are dozens of other large pharmas, mid-size drug developers and fledgling biotech startups that seek to get into the space from different angles.
Traggis said it’s too early to disclose any specifics of his company’s pipeline other than that they’re targeting incretins and other “class B GPCRs.” But he said Ambrosia is not aware of any other small molecules, whether still in preclinical testing or already being studied in humans, that go after the same targets as the ones its researchers are exploring.
Nick Traggis“We’re not just gonna rip off another” molecule, he said, like other companies have. “There is some novel work to be done here.”
Drug developers still in the GLP-1 vicinity, or not too far afield, are rushing to get their experimental drugs through the clinic. Meanwhile, some large pharma executives, like Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan, have made it clear that they’re not interested in “me-too” candidates in the obesity field.
For next-generation players to compete, the thinking goes, they’ll have to find new targets and hit on a variety of factors, whether that’s being orally available, carrying less side effect baggage, helping preserve muscle mass or other aspects.
Ambrosia hopes to be one of those new entrants that can carve a lane in the crowded obesity field.
Just look to its name, which derives from ancient Greek mythology. The magical food of the gods, ambrosia was thought to stave off mortality, Traggis said.