Flagship Pioneering-backed Sail Biomedicines has laid off 12 employees following a review of the company’s organizational structure, leaving 125 staff still employed.
“We regularly review Sail's organizational structure to ensure that we are appropriately resourced to meet our goals,” a Sail spokesperson said in an email to Fierce Biotech. “As we focus on progressing our pipeline toward the clinic, we have made the decision to reduce our workforce by 12 employees.”
The spokesperson declined to specify what roles were affected by the layoffs.
Sail began its voyage in choppy waters, fashioned from the 2023 merging of prior Flagship companies Laronde and Senda Biosciences. That merger came in the wake of accusations of troubled data underpinning Laronde’s $440 million series B in 2021; a Stat and Boston Globe investigation found a “bad assay” and poor note-taking in some of the key preclinical research.
Sail’s focus is on programmable RNA medicines, specifically circular RNA molecules that the company calls endless RNA or eRNA. While mRNA degrades quickly, limiting the time it can be turned into functional therapeutic proteins, eRNA lasts longer and can therefore generate more protein, according to Sail.
Sail is working on programs spanning a wide range of therapeutic areas including infectious disease, rare disease, metabolism and autoimmune disease, according to the company’s website.
The company's preclinical pipeline includes an in vivo CAR immune reprogramming program, a GLP-1 program, a liver-targeting enzyme replacement therapy, and an antibody and vaccine for malaria. A spokesperson declined to share which program Sail intends to bring to the clinic first.
Multiple Flagship-backed companies have conducted layoffs recently, such as Empress Therapeutics, Apriori Bio, Omega Therapeutics, Ring Therapeutics and Sonata Therapeutics. Decisions to lay off staff are made by the individual companies, not by Flagship as part of a broad strategy, a Flagship spokesperson told Fierce Biotech in March.
Though many of its companies have sent staff packing recently, Flagship is still in the biotech building business. The incubator supported the $200 million launch of artificial intelligence biotech Lila Sciences in early March, a company that aims to build a “scientific superintelligence.”