From the left: Jerel Davis of Versant Ventures, researcher Jim Ding and David Powell, Head of Research for Borealis Biosciences, chat at the Borealis Biosciences lab in Vancouver, on Aug. 21.Tijana Martin /The Globe and Mail
The group behind one of the biggest takeovers in Canadian biotech has teamed up again to launch the latest addition to Vancouver’s teeming life-sciences sector.
San Francisco-based Versant Ventures and Swiss pharma giant Novartis AG NVS-N are set to announce Thursday that they have committed US$150-million to launch Borealis Biosciences, a startup that will develop RNA medicines to fight kidney disease.
The vast majority of Borealis’s 25-person founding team previously worked for Chinook Therapeutics Inc., which was hatched in Vancouver by Versant and bought last year by Novartis for US$3.5-billion. Borealis will operate out of the same Vancouver office and labs previously occupied by Chinook, and before that by another Versant-created company where many of the same team also worked.
“In many ways, Borealis is Chinook 2.0,” said Versant’s Vancouver-based managing director, Jerel Davis, who is also the new company’s executive chair.
“We wanted to figure out how to use the incredible strengths of this team, many of them have been working together for more than 10 years and who have a fully functioning lab. It usually takes a year or two to get a team and a lab built and running well, and here we had an A-plus team that already knows how to work together.”
A biotechnology leadership team “is one of the hardest things to construct, and if there is already good chemistry and a good working relationship and willingness to do this again, you are already mid-field,” said Brian Bloom, chief executive officer of Toronto life sciences underwriter Bloom Burton & Co.
Key Borealis leaders include David Powell, a member of the two previous Versant-backed Vancouver startups; research leader Adam Judge, a veteran local biotech executive who previously founded Versant-backed Abdera Therapeutics; and Alex Bell, who led the kidney research group at Ionis Pharmaceuticals Inc. IONS-Q, which is also developing RNA medications. A search is under way for a CEO.
The Borealis financing is comprised of US$50-million of venture capital from Versant and Novartis, plus US$100-million in upfront and near-term funding from Novartis to fuel a strategic research collaboration in the pharma giant’s focus areas of kidney medicine and RNA technologies. As part of the deal, Novartis has the option to buy two future development-ready programs from Borealis for up to US$750-million combined.
“We believe Borealis will foster an ideal environment for an exceptional founding team to continue to pioneer renal science and drug discovery,” said Fiona Marshall, president of biomedical research with Novartis, in a statement.
Versant, which has operated in Canada for a decade, often works closely with big pharma companies to create stand-alone drug developers in therapeutic areas of high interest. If the startups deliver solid clinical results, pharma giants often buy them.
One of Versant’s early Canadian successes was BlueRock Therapeutics, which was funded and later acquired by Bayer AG BAYZF. Versant launched Chinook in 2018 after realizing few kidney disease drugs had been developed over the prior 20 years and seeing giants including Novartis build discovery groups in the area.
Like Chinook, Borealis is pursuing treatments for kidney ailments, but it is taking a different approach. Chinook’s drugs, atrasentan and zigakibart, work to reduce the level of protein in the urine of patients with IgA nephropathy, a rare kidney disease.
Borealis is hoping to develop drugs for other kidney ailments where the cause of problems are known but traditional medication has not worked to treat them. Instead, it is looking to use RNA medicine, an emerging area of pharma science that yielded global success during the pandemic as the basis of COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
RNA medicines deliver instructions to targeted cells in the body to produce more or less select proteins that counteract a particular ailment. These cellular instruction manuals are typically delivered by another nanoparticle that gets the RNA medicine safely to its destination. Vancouver is home of Acuitas Therapeutics Inc., which made the delivery mechanism for Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine.
While RNA medicines have been developed for liver and blood, “we realized that no one has successfully, systematically cracked this” in kidney therapies, Mr. Davis said. Two other companies, Ionis and Regulus Therapeutics Inc. RGLS-Q, are also developing RNA-focused medicines for chronic kidney diseases.
Mr. Davis said the ex-Chinook team had done extensive research on kidney biology and the 40 different cell types within the organ and is “well positioned to figure out which cell types need to be modulated, which genes, for which disease.” While Borealis is young “we have good ideas on targets, on approaches and some early data.”