Quotient Therapeutics kicks-off with US$50m financing
Flagship Pioneering has committed US$50m to launch Quotient Therapeutics that links genetic variation at cellular level with disease by Nanoseq, a sequencing method licenced from the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
Flagship has confírmed to invest $50m in Quotient Therapeutics to advance development of a platform, licenced from Wellcome Sanger Institue following two years of development at Flagship Labs and pursue a pipeline of medicines across a wide range of therapeutic areas and modalities.
With the help of laser microdissection and Nanoseq, Dr Iñigo Martincorena, academic founder of Quotient Therapeutics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, was able to identify cells or little group of cells in biopsies from ageing people that accumulated cancer-driver mutations. According to Geoffrey von Maltzahn, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Quotient Therapeutics and General Partner, Flagship Pioneering, “some genetic changes make a cell resistant or vulnerable to disease, while others can cause disease. We started Quotient to study the natural genetics library inside every tissue, discover gene variants that are beneficial, neutral, or disease-causing, and to harness that knowledge to develop medicines of tomorrow.
Quotients Somatic Genomics platform utilizes proprietary single molecule, genome sequencing technology to reveal the extensive variation encoded in the somatic genome at unprecedented resolution. Created by Flagship scientists in partnership with leading geneticists at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Texas Southwestern, this platform is able to study natural selection at the cellular level through four steps: phenotyping of cells from clinical tissue samples, isolation, single cell genotyping, and computation. As a result, naturally selected genes, proteins, and pathways are identified as prospective targets for the development of transformative therapies intended to cure, prevent, or reverse disease. Quotients approach has the potential to discover first-in-class meds across a broad range of modalities and therapeutic areas, including immune disease, cardiometabolic disease, infectious disease, oncology, neurodegenerative disease, rare disease, and ageing.
Academic co-founders of Quotient include Professor Sir Mike Stratton, MD, PhD, Inigo Martincorena, PhD, and Peter Campbell, PhD, from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and Hao Zhu, MD, from University of Texas Southwestern. In addition to von Maltzahn and Rubens, Quotient is led by Scott Hayton, Ph.D., as Acting Chief Operating Officer, Caroline Fox, M.D., MPH, as Senior Vice President, Head of Genetics and Target Discovery, and Simon Brunner, Ph.D., as Co-Founder and Head of Platform. Quotient is co- located in Cambridge, MA and Cambridge, UK with research facilities in both cities.
