Ampersand snags $50M as Flagship focuses therapeutics on desired targets only 

The behemoth biotech creator Flagship Pioneering is out with another startup aiming to achieve the crown jewel of drug development: treatments that hit only the desired target and cause no unwanted effects elsewhere.

Ampersand Biomedicines is the Boston incubator’s latest biotech to open its blinds, with Flagship dishing out a $50 million check to bankroll initial work.

Leading the charge at Ampersand is Flagship general partner Avak Kahvejian, who’s also founding CEO of ProFound Therapeutics and has been involved in the early days of multiple other companies formed by the engine that sparked Moderna.

The 33-employee startup is building out an internal pipeline of protein drugs, mainly biologics, that span multiple undisclosed disease areas, Kahvejian told Endpoints News in a preview of the launch.

Advancements in technology and biology have helped the industry understand the human body way more in recent years, allowing for a more detailed blueprint of where proteins reside and, importantly, where they don’t.

“Using computation, we can elucidate those that could serve as highly specific beacons or addresses to target therapies with a very high degree of precision and resolution,” the founding CEO explained.

That leads to Ampersand creating potential new medicines that entail a “localizer that takes advantage of that address and then an actuator, which will carry out the therapeutic function and potentially mediate the biology through a different target on the cell or in the vicinity of the cell,” per Kahvejian, who’s also helped spur Flagship’s spinouts of Seres Therapeutics, Cellarity, Rubius Therapeutics, Laronde, Codiak BioSciences and others.

Current medicines can have off-target toxicity concerns as a result of not only hitting the desired diseased tissue but also unwanted areas.

“It’s left a lot of targets that are really meaningful that have really strong biological potential on the cutting-room floor because of their tissue distribution, where you know and love the target, but you say, ‘It’s in too many risky areas for us to even envision drugging it,’” as Kahvejian told it.

The company said it can identify localizers for “any organ, cell, and disease.” It’s part of the moonshot-esque approaches that Flagship embeds in its project offshoots. The moniker behind the latest is a nod to Ampersand’s platform, dubbed AND, which is short for address, navigate, design.

Noubar Afeyan

On the founding team of the company, formed in 2020, are Kahvejian, Flagship leader Noubar Afeyan and his nephew Raffi Afeyan, as well as Yann Echelard, Charlotte Nicod and Nick Plugis. Ampersand’s chief technology officer is Daniël Blom, a former SVP of drug discovery and development at Cygnal Therapeutics who has contributed to two monoclonal antibody and four small molecule clinical candidates while at Cygnal, Merck and GSK.

In Flagship fashion, Kahvejian said more companies are in the works, without naming names. Recent company filings and websites point to stealth-mode artificial biologics maker Abiologics, “cost-effective medicines” maker Empress Therapeutics (led by Sonata co-founder Jason Park), RNA-focused Radial Therapeutics, cell and gene therapy companies and others.

“There’s a couple of different modalities that we’re working on, and a couple different biological insights that we’re working on,” Kahvejian said. “They will all be announced, or some of them will be announced, in due course, maybe this year and next.”

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biologics
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