With $110M and UMass Medical School technology, therapeutics firm gets underway

Photo | Grant Welker UMass Medical School in Worcester

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By Grant Welker

A new therapeutics company is getting started by three UMass Medical School researchers with $110 million in funding and the use of technology licensed from the Worcester school.

At the heart of the new Boston company, Atalanta Therapeutics, is a proprietary technology licensed by UMass Medical School, which is a part-founder along with three of its researchers: Anastasia Khvorova, Craig Mello and Neil Aronin. They're using a proprietary technology licensed by the medical school called branched siRNA, an advancement in gene capabilities, that aims to treat neurodegenerative diseases.

UMass Medical School's co-founders are among three of its top researchers, Atalanta said.

Mello is a distinguished professor of RNA therapeutics and molecular medicine and was a co-recipient in 2006 of a Nobel Prize for his discovery of RNA, or ribonucleic acid, interference. Khvorova, a professor of RNA therapeutics, has more than 20 years of experience developing oligonucleotide technology and therapeutics, and has played a foundational role in the field of RNAi drug design and development. Aronin, a professor of medicine and RNA therapeutics, is a leader in research into Huntington's disease for more than three decades.

RNA technology developed by the UMass Medical School team can silence harmful genes across the central nervous system and be applied to various neurodegenerative diseases, Atalanta said.

Atalanta announced its launch on Monday with some major funding and collaborations already in place. Atalanta has strategic partnerships with Biogen, a Cambridge biotech firm, and Genentech, a part of the Swiss health tech firm Roche. It also has $110 million in financing from those partnerships and from F-Prime Capital of Cambridge.

In its partnership with Biogen, Atalanta will develop RNAi therapeutics for treatment of Huntington's disease, among others targeted. With Genentech, Atalanta will develop therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.