Merck Pays Harvard $20M For "Accelerated" Cancer Drugs
Summary
The Blavatnik accelerator’s chief scientific officer Curtis Keith says his team has been working with Shair’s lab for almost four years, and has put “significantly more” money into this project than is typical.For instance, NYU Langone Medical Center, as I wrote last week, has an “office of therapeutics alliances” that leans on partnerships with contract research organizations and input from seasoned advisors to push projects forward.Harvard chemist Andrew Myers used accelerator funding to advance antibiotics research that turned into a startup called Macrolide Pharmaceuticals, which raised a $22 million Series A round a year ago.The accelerator has also helped turn work from chemical biology professor Tobias Ritter into SciFluor Life Sciences, and research from cell biologists Daniel Finley, Alfred Goldberg, and Randall King into drug candidates now in preclinical development at Proteostasis Therapeutics (NASDAQ: PTI).Shair’s work led to a licensing deal with a big company, rather than the formation of a startup, because the compounds are likely to reach patients faster that way, according to Kohlberg.