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Achieving broad distribution of RNAi therapeutics throughout the CNS has been a limitation in developing effective medicines for neurodegenerative diseases.

Treating neurological diseases is one of the most challenging existing medical problems we face today. Although gene silencing techniques such as RNAi or ASOs hold great promise, limited distribution throughout the entire brain, even with local injection, has significantly hampered their therapeutic potential. Atalanta Therapeutics founding scientists Anastasia Khvorova, PhD, Nobel laureate Craig Mello, PhD, and Neil Aronin, MD, from UMass Medical School’s RNA Therapeutics Institute, made a major breakthrough by identifying a novel RNAi structure called branched siRNA that enables broad distribution throughout the brain, including deep brain structures. Building on this initial discovery, scientists at Atalanta are developing a robust pipeline of RNAi therapeutics to address CNS diseases such as Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

At F-Prime, we immediately recognized the power of this novel technology and, in collaboration with the founding scientists who helped to spin the technology out into a newco. We quickly recruited Alicia Secor as the CEO and first employee who has, in turn, assembled a world-class management team of veteran biotech experts from the ground up.

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“F-Prime played a critical role in guiding the development of our strategy and execution of our launch. We remain confident in our partnership and can trust in their continued support as we progress as a company.”

Alicia Secor, CEO

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Following a Series A funding round, led exclusively by F-Prime, and fueled by strategic collaborations with Biogen and Genentech, Atalanta launched in 2021 with $110 million. F-Prime believes the company is positioned for success through our collaborative effort and aligned mission.

Our involvement with innovative companies like Atalanta strengthens our confidence that new treatment options for patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases will one day be available and broadly accessible.

Many human proteins are intrinsically disordered and play a critical role in key biological processes — predicting their behaviour could unlock therapeutics acting at new high-value targets.

F-Prime Capital has been an active investor in computational approaches for drug discovery since 2016.  Evaluating many companies in the sector since that time, Peptone’s approach stood out as a potential breakthrough because of its unique position at the intersection of biology and physics and because of the hard problem being addressed: how to drug disordered proteins.

Disordered proteins span several biological classes, including hormones, enzymes, growth factors, cytokines and transcription factors and their impact on human physiology and disease has become increasingly apparent in recent years. Yet the fluidity of these proteins – they lack a consistent 3D structure – has historically made drug discovery challenging.

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“F-Prime has been a fantastic financing partner. Prior to investing they dug in deep and helped us develop our strategy.”

—Kamil Tamiola, PhD, CO-Founder, CEO

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Peptone was founded by Kamil Tamiola, PhD, and Matt Heberling, PhD with the goal of using experimentally derived biophysical data and molecular dynamics simulations to model the behaviour of disordered targets so enabling investigation of new drug candidates. The company has had multiple R&D collaborations with big pharmaceutical companies which have been highly productive.

In June 2022, F-Prime was delighted to co-lead a $40 million Series A financing of Peptone. The Series A funds are being used to advance the company’s tech platform, to establish a state-of-the-art research facility in Switzerland and to advance a proprietary drug discovery pipeline.

Predicting the structure and nature of protein-ligand interactions could enable a revolution in virtual screening potentially addressing difficult-to-drug molecular targets.

Over the past decade, we have witnessed rapid progress in AI and have kept a keen eye on recent advancements in protein structure prediction. Laksh Aithani, founder of genei and a former machine learning expert at Exscientia, shares our belief that the potential for deep learning could transform next-generation structure-guided drug discovery efforts.

We helped connect Laksh to David Baker, PhD, winner of the Breakthrough Prize for his work in novel protein design and a world-renowned leader in predicting accurate three-dimensional structures of proteins – arguably the most significant breakthrough in applying AI to life sciences – whom we had worked with in the early days of Sana Biotechnology. Together, they fused a vision and plan to address the “protein-ligand” problem, fueling the creation of CHARM Tx to harness the power of 3D deep learning to deliver breakthrough medicines.

“Without F-Prime, CHARM simply would not exist. F-Prime played a crucial role in syndicating the financing, building the initial business plan and recruiting stellar co-founders, executives and board members to the team.”

—Laksh Aithani, Co-Founder, CEO

At F-Prime, we have a passion for helping build early-stage companies and believe in providing support beyond our initial investment. While Laksh worked out of our London office, F-Prime Partner Nihal Sinha, MD, Venture Partner Muz Mansuri, PhD, and Senior Associate Martin Taylor, PhD, helped to establish the company by assisting with initial hiring, business plan development and advisory network creation. Under the leadership of Laksh as CEO, CHARM Tx recently came out of stealth mode with a $50 million seed financing co-led by OrbiMed and appointed the Founder and CEO of Odyssey Therapeutics, Gary Glick, PhD, as its Executive Chairman.

CHARM Tx brings a profound problem to the forefront of drug discovery and has the team and technology to translate hope into promise for patients with cancer and other diseases.