Mnemosyne names new CEO on verge of Big Pharma partnership
Rhode Island drug research and discovery firm poised to leap to next stage
PROVIDENCE – The selection of Vanessa King as the new president and CEO of Rhode Island-based Mnemosyne Pharmaceuticals, Inc., presages the next step in the evolution of the firm’s path to success – closing on a major partnership deal with Big Pharma to develop a fast-acting anti-depression drug, based upon its discovery work in small molecule therapeutics targeting NMDA receptor subunits.
King most recently had served as head of Amgen’s East Coast business development and licensing operations, as well as external venture innovation. She had previously directed business development for deCODE genetics, Inc., an Icelandic company that was acquired by Amgen for $415 million in 2012.
“What drew me to Mnemosyne was the fundamental motivating science behind its platform,” King told ConvergenceRI in a recent interview. The drug discovery program that was closest to the clinic, she continued, is a rapid-acting agent to combat depression. “It’s a big unmet need,” she said. “We want to see this getting to patients as rapidly as possible.”
King, who had also worked in business development and operations at Novartis Institutes of Biomedical Research and at the Venter Institute, brings an expertise in deal making to her new role. Her immediate challenge, King said, “is to get the deal teed up” for Mnemosyne’s lead drug platform with a likely pharmaceutical partner.
She succeeds Kollol Pal, the founding CEO of Mnemosyne, who had shepherded the company from its start – when the firm’s initial business plan had been written out on napkins at a diner on Allens Avenue.
Good science and serendipity
The story of Mnemosyne, named for the Greek goddess of memory, captures the way in which serendipity, good science, convenient location, and entrepreneurship has helped to shape Rhode Island’s emerging innovation ecosystem.
Pal and his co-founders, including Frank Menniti, the firm’s chief scientific officer, had been asked by Richard Horan, senior managing director at the Slater Technology Fund, to provide technical advice on a potential investment. They had recommended against investing in that particular technology platform.
But the chance meeting with Menniti, who had previously worked with Pfizer in Connecticut, proved to be catalytic. Menniti, who was based in Groton, and Pal, who was based in Boston, found Providence to be the perfect place to meet and talk – and to launch a new drug discovery startup.
Mnemosyne went to Slater Technology Fund for its initial $250,000 seed investment in May of 2010. Since then, Mnemosyne has raised $11.5 million in Series A financing, including $6 million in July of 2013, with new investment support coming from Atlas Venture and continued support from Clal Biotechnology Industries and Slater.
The science behind the company had emerged from a previous failed drug platform, according to Pal.
In the 1980s, Pfizer had sought to develop an NMDA receptor antagonist, known as CP101606, to treat schizophrenia, but after many failed clinical trials, abandoned that potential drug platform, Pal said in an interview with the reporter in 2011.
Pal and Menniti, who had been involved in that work, saw an unrealized opportunity, asking: why not seek to create a drug to increase the receptor's activity?
For Horan, what attracted Slater was the company’s strategic focus, the high caliber of the founding team, and its strong mix of scientific, its entrepreneurial know-how, and its world-class group of scientific advisers, he told the reporter in 2011.
Mnemosyne’s research platform – initially focused on schizophrenia – has now branched out to include drug development opportunities for depression and Rett Syndrome [a genetic neurodevelopmental disorder that occurs almost exclusively in girls].
In addition, the company’s research has also uncovered potential to develop new compounds to address traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorders. [See link ConvergenceRI story below.]
A nimble response
Mnemosyne’s drug discovery platform was very much a nimble, entrepreneurial response to the decision by major pharmaceutical companies to shut down their research in this area, according to King.
The decision by pharmaceutical companies of where to put their incremental R&D resources, King told ConvergenceRI, was “a fairly understandable calculation [because] the biology and the clinical manifestations of these diseases [such as schizophrenia] are so challenging.”
Now, King continued, “Mnemosyne can bring products that fill a gap in the pharmacy companies’ pipelines, taking [drugs] to market. We are in a perfect spot to keep investing in our unique assets and our intellectual property in this area.”
King’s career path to Amgen, directing East Coast business development and venture innovation, came about as a result of deCODE genetics being acquired in 2012.
The company, which had been founded in 1996, had gone bankrupt in 2009, and King was part of the turn-around team, joining the firm in 2010.
In that capacity, King had brokered successful collaborations with Pfizer and Genentech to use the company’s technology to drill deeper beyond common genetic variants.
As a result of the collaboration with Genentech, King said, there was a paper published in Nature that looked at genetic polymorphism and Alzheimer’s disease. “It was one of the seminal papers [showing] you can look for rare variants with large effects,” she explained, providing much more information about human diseases than common variants. “We showed that human genetics were ready for prime time for discovery,” she said.
All of her background, King continued, makes her a great fit for Mnemosyne to enable the firm “to really scale up rapidly.”
When asked, given her work with Amgen, whether it might be in the mix of potential partnerships, she responded with an indirect answer, saying: “We would love to do pharma partnerships.”
Rhode Island’s innovation ecosystem
Mnemosyne plans to stay headquartered in Rhode Island “as far as I know,” according to King, who, from her experience in Europe with Novartis, was taught to pursue innovation and expansion beyond “the flavor” of the current hot spots.
King said that the things that most attracted her to Mnemosyne was the quality of the science, the quality of the team, and the quality of the board. “There is a strong combination of skill sets,” she said.
She said that she just at the beginning of learning curve for interacting with “the Rhode Island innovation ecosystem.” Her sense, King continued, “is there is so much potential there, both for this company and what it could do for Rhode Island.”