A startup with ties to two biotech legends and Stanford University is emerging from stealth with a portfolio of preclinical parasite-fighting drugs.
Kainomyx Inc. — launched by a Stanford-connected team including scientist Jim Spudich, a winner of the prestigious Lasker Award — is targeting malaria, leishmaniasis and other parasitic diseases. Spudich was one of the founders of Cytokinetics Inc. (NASDAQ: CYTK), which is taking an equity position in the new company, transferring a set of drugs and incubating the startup at its South San Francisco headquarters.
The compounds contributed by Cytokinetics are only part of a larger Kainomyx portfolio.
Spudich, who was chair of the Stanford medical school's biochemistry department, is president and CEO of the new company. The startup received $7.5 million in May from Chiron co-founder and biotech industry legend Bill Rutter — a founder of early biotech company Chiron Corp. — as well as Open Philanthropy and Spudich and his wife, Annamma Spudich.
Other Kainomyx principals are Dr. Kathleen Ruppel, who was co-principal investigator in Jim Spudich's lab; Darshan Trivedi, a postdoctoral fellow in Spudich's lab; Suman Nag, who is a cardiovascular discovery biology lead scientist at MyoKardia; and Annamma Spudich, who was a cell biology researcher at Stanford for 25 years.
Kainomyx is attacking a set of diseases that devastates developing countries but also carry risks to other nations with increased worldwide travel. While there are treatments for malaria, the company said, the mechanisms of artemisinin-based combination therapy, for example, are not well understood and resistance to those drugs is occurring.
Malaria kills more than 450,000 people every year; the majority of those deaths are in children under 10.
Spudich and colleagues, first at the University of California, San Francisco, and then Stanford, originated the term "cytoskeleton" to describe a system of "molecular motors" that certain proteins use within cells.
"Our approach is to develop small molecule therapeutics against target proteins that we have studied for decades and meet six essential characteristics — they are vital components of parasite function, mechanistically well understood, essential at multiple stages of the parasite life cycle, highly druggable, less likely to be subject to resistance and can be targeted with high specificity," Spudich said in a statement.
Cytokinetics has programs of its own and collaborations with Astellas Pharma Inc. and Amgen Inc. in muscle diseases ranging from heart failure to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Along the way, the company also discovered small molecules that selectively block a protein in parasites that could help Kainomyx.
Terms of the deal weren't disclosed, except Cytokinetics said it will be eligible for single-digit royalties if Kainomyx develops and commercializes the Cytokinetics molecules.
Cytokinetics President and CEO Robert Blum said in a statement Monday that his company was "pleased to partner again" with Spudich, who also co-founded the Brisbane heart drug company MyoKardia Inc. (NASDAQ: MYOK).
