Scoop: Blade Therapeutics CEO, CFO appear to depart amid ‘transition’ after nixed SPAC

The two top executives at Blade Therapeutics appear to no longer be with the biotech after the startup failed to merge with its SPAC partner earlier this year.

The biotech’s CEO and CFO no longer list the San Francisco-based drug developer as their employer on their LinkedIn pages, and other employee profiles list themselves as “open to work.” When reached via LinkedIn on Thursday, former CEO Wendye Robbins said the company is “in the middle of a transition.”

Jean-Frederic Viret

“I will be able to update you soon,” Robbins said when asked about the company’s current status and any next steps.

Endpoints News was unable to immediately reach CFO Jean-Frederic Viret or other employees whose LinkedIn pages indicate that they are no longer with the company. Multiple calls could not be completed to the biotech’s main phone number, and an email to person previously listed as the company’s communications contact bounced back.

The biotech’s LinkedIn page also appears to have been deleted: Employee profiles and the company’s own website direct to a page that “no longer exists,” according to the jobs and networking site. Searches for other, similar company names come up empty. And portions of the company’s website on careers, clinical trials, and news and investor pages, have all been pulled, according to a comparison of the current site with an older version available through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Founded in 2015, Blade built a pipeline of oral, small molecule drugs that it hoped would treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, liver and cardiac fibrosis, as well as Huntington’s disease. The biotech originated at Johns Hopkins and had reeled in investors Deerfield, MPM Capital and from the pharma industry, including Pfizer, Novartis and Bristol Myers Squibb.

In November 2021, it inked a deal to go public via a blank-check vehicle, but the merger agreement with Biotech Acquisition Company was terminated in June of this year. The same investors who previously backed Blade, including the drugmakers, anchored a PIPE as part of the proposed SPAC, which altogether was supposed to give the biotech $254 million.

The SPAC has just six more weeks to complete a business combination, according to SEC filings.

Blade placed most of its bets on the experimental drug cudetaxestat, which the biotech said in September would likely move into Phase II development in IPF, either as a monotherapy or combined with approved treatments. Genentech makes Esbriet and Boehringer Ingelheim markets Ofev, the two approved IPF drugs, both greenlit in 2014. Sandoz launched the first generic of Esbriet in the US earlier this year.

Alex Hoffman contributed reporting.

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