A spinout from UCSF affiliate Gladstone Institutes, Tenaya secured funding from VC firm Column Group to develop cures for heart disease.
US-based biopharmaceutical company Tenaya Therapeutics spun out of Gladstone Institutes yesterday with $50m in series A funding provided by healthcare-focused investment firm Column Group.
Gladstone Institutes, a nonprofit life sciences research organisation affiliated with University of California, San Francisco, focuses on unsolved diseases of the brain, the heart and the immune system. Three entities make up Gladstone – Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, Institute of Virology and Immunology and Institute of Neurological Disease.
Tenaya is the first spinout from BioFulcrum, an entrepreneurial initiative within Gladstone that aims to accelerate the discovery of cures by bringing together scientists, nonprofit institutions and industry partners such as BioFulcrum board member David Goeddel, a managing partner at Column Group.
Goeddel is also board chair of Tenaya, while JJ Kang, an associate at Column Group, is board director and president of the new company.
Deepak Srivastava, director of the Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, co-founded Tenaya Therapeutics to build on Gladstone’s work in cellular reprogramming to develop treatments for heart failure, a condition afflicting more than 20 million people around the world.
A key focus at Tenaya will be to use reprogramming technology to regenerate heart muscle cells in patients with heart failure. Another Tenaya research project will use cellular models of heart disease created from stem cells to identify potential new drug targets.
Other Tenaya co-founders include Gladstone researchers Benoit Bruneau, Bruce Conklin, Sheng Ding and Saptarsi Haldar, as well as Eric Olson, professor and chairman at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
Sanders Williams, president of Gladstone and board member of Tenaya, said: “The launch of Tenaya Therapeutics exemplifies Gladstone’s fierce dedication to scientific discovery and to putting those discoveries on a path to pioneering new therapeutics.”
Deepak Srivastava, co-founder of Tenaya, said: “When heart muscle is damaged, the body is unable to repair the dead or injured cells. Right now, the only possible cure for heart failure is a heart transplant. We hope that this new venture will bring us closer to a more scalable cure.”
Cardiovascular disease, including heart attacks and strokes, is the leading cause of death in the world, claiming 14.1 million lives in 2012, about 0.2% of the global population, according to the World Health Organisation.
