A new biotech is hitting the Boston scene with $50 million from Flagship Pioneering and a goal of preventing patients from ever getting seriously sick in the first place.
Etiome has spent the last four years quietly building a platform to map out how diseases progress over time, tracking key molecules and biomarkers to identify not only potential drug targets but also when those drugs should be taken to stop disease in its tracks.
The $50 million launching pad will support Etiome’s development of what the company calls preemptive medicines, which will initially focus on serious and progressive metabolic, neurodegenerative, and autoimmune diseases and cancers, Etiome announced in an April 24 release.
The startup was one of the first efforts to originate from Flagship’s Preemptive Health and Medicine Initiative, Avak Kahvejian, Ph.D., the founding CEO of Etiome and a general partner at Flagship, told Fierce Biotech in an interview.
The company combines multiomics data, artificial intelligence (AI) and electronic health records (EHRs) to “build a molecular and cellular journey of disease,” Kahvejian explained, “elucidating all the changes that one undergoes before, during and after disease, to identify new opportunities to treat people sooner rather than later.”
Etiome cut its teeth on the fatty liver disease metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH), combining data from patients with different stages of the disease to build what Kahvejian called “movies of the molecular changes that are occurring” as the disease progresses.
Though Etiome’s approach is agnostic to therapeutic area, MASH is where the team has made the most progress thus far, Kahvejian said.
“Not only did we build these movies, we actually found targets, we found biomarkers,” he said, and the team has validated them in animal and organoid models. Drugging the target at the right time in those models, Kahvejian said, can prevent fat from accumulating in the liver or ensure that accumulated fat doesn’t progress to liver damage.
Kahvejian declined to share a timeline for when an asset from Etiome, in MASH or otherwise, may enter the clinic. MASH has seen many R&D flops in the clinic over the years, though the FDA approval of Madrigal's MASH med Rezdiffra just over a year ago, the first-ever in the space, has seen a new gold rush of biotechs attempting to get in on this potential megablockbuster market.
In typical Flagship fashion, Kahvejian said the company is focused on building up the platform and proving its generalizability in diverse areas, such as Alzheimer’s disease and colorectal cancer. This can then draw attention from pharmaceutical companies interested in a specific disease area looking for partnerships.
“We're already having a lot of inbound interest,” Kahvejian added, “just by virtue of having some early conversations and showcasing what we've done.”
A market for preemptive medicines naturally requires patients, whether seemingly healthy or sick, to be regularly screened for biomarkers indicating that they need one of Etiome’s future drugs. Far from being a potential roadblock, this need fits squarely with the company’s long-term goals, Kahvejian said.
“It is possible for these kinds of things to get adopted and sort of almost passively and quietly slip into our routine medical care,” Kahvejian said, similar to how measurements like cholesterol and triglycerides are now used to prescribe statins to patients at risk of cardiovascular diseases. “We think if we develop enough of these biomarkers for enough of these diseases, and they truly are validated and we can show them having an impact, then we'll get more and more adoption,” he said.
“It's going to be part of our routine healthcare system,” Kahvejian added, “and moving our healthcare system from a sick-care system to more of a truly health preservation and increasing our healthspans, not just our lifespans.”
Etiome’s emergence comes in the wake of another Flagship launch, the $200 million March debut of Lila Sciences. Lila is also looking to use AI as well as autonomous labs to achieve “scientific superintelligence,” and counts CRISPR pioneer George Church, Ph.D., as chief scientist.