Flagship Pioneering is gearing up to launch a new company that seems to be developing precisely targeted treatments for neurodegenerative conditions, including Parkinson’s.
The new startup, dubbed Vesalius Therapeutics, will be led by Chris Austin, a high-profile recent Flagship recruit who was the founding director of the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences and a senior adviser to the National Human Genome Research Institute. Neurodegenerative conditions are one of his scientific areas of expertise.
Austin first described himself as CEO of Vesalius in October, according to public records reviewed by STAT. This will be his first Flagship company since joining the Cambridge, Mass.-based firm in March 2021. Austin also previously worked at Merck, researching new targets and treatments for schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s.
Vesalius is clearly getting ready to make a public debut; though the company has yet to formally launch, it registered a domain name for its website in early November. As is usual with Flagship spinouts, very little else is yet public about its endeavors or targets. STAT uncovered a mention of the startup’s Parkinson’s focus in a former employee’s online resume. (That former employee did not respond to a request for comment from STAT.)
“We believe it is time to bring a fresh approach to treating common illnesses,” the company’s new website says.
Flagship is known for placing big bets on even bigger ideas. The firm typically develops startups around patents that Flagship itself files, based on work that its own employees do in-house. Flagship tends to build “platform companies” that can explore a wide variety of potential applications of these patents, rather than building a company around a collection of individual experimental drugs. In Vesalius’ case, then, Parkinson’s is probably not the only thing that the company is working on — nor are neurodegenerative conditions likely the only area the company is interested in.
Austin is one of a handful of former government officials that have recently joined Flagship Pioneering. In July 2021, former FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn also joined the firm as the chief medical officer of the firm’s “preemptive medicine” efforts.
Both Flagship Pioneering and Austin declined to comment.
The company now known as Vesalius Therapeutics was incorporated as Flagship Labs 60 in October 2018. The company was also known as Serqet Therapeutics from late 2020 until October 2021.
The company’s current job openings and former employees’ publicly available resumes and LinkedIn descriptions give a sense of what exactly the company will be doing — and like many Flagship projects, Vesalius seems to be taking an ambitious approach.
One former employee’s LinkedIn said that they had worked on “several large-scale single-cell sequencing projects, deemed by subject matter expert[s] to be among the largest single cell datasets ever generated.” (The employee did not respond to a message from STAT.)
Current open positions at Vesalius include one position geared toward developing small-molecule drugs and another for a machine learning specialist who will work with “clinical real-world data,” which could include data collected from the medical records of real people who are taking a particular drug or who have a particular diagnosis.
Job postings — which still include the Serqet name in some places — also state that the company’s mission is to develop “novel therapeutic strategies targeted to responder patient populations for various complex diseases.”
“Complex diseases” isn’t just Vesalius hyping itself up — it’s actually a term with a specific meaning. Indeed, most conditions fall into this category because they are the result of multiple factors, like a person’s genetics and the environment.
