With help from Lululemon founder’s venture philanthropy, Vita adds second muscular dystrophy indication to lineup
12 Oct 2022
CollaborateGene TherapyAntibodyCell TherapyImmunotherapy
Earlier this year, Lululemon’s founder Chip Wilson went public with his rare disease diagnosis of facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy type 2, or FSHD type 2, in which the muscles degenerate over time. Wilson also committed $100 million to find a cure for FSHD through a new venture, Solve FSHD.
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Source: Endpts
Chip Wilson
Now, up to $10 million of that commitment is going to Vita Therapeutics, a Baltimore-based cell therapy biotech, and Vita will be adding a discovery-phase FSHD cell therapy to its pipeline. Solve FSHD’s executive director Eva Chin will also be joining Vita’s board.
The money from Solve FSHD is part of Vita’s $31 million Series B. Cambrian BioPharma, which launched Vita, also led this round of funding, followed by Riptide Ventures, Cedars Sinai, TEDCO, and others.
Last year, Cambrian, the anti-aging portfolio company headed by atai co-founder Christian Angermayer, unveiled Vita with a $32 million Series A.
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Most of the new cash infusion will go toward Vita’s lead program, dubbed VTA-100. The candidate is a cell therapy for limb-girdle muscular dystrophy type 2a (LGMD2A), the most common type of LGMD.
While it’s still in preclinical studies, Vita’s CEO Doug Falk said the company hopes to reach the clinic within 18 months.
“We’re really on the verge of kicking off the IND-enabling studies. In parallel to those studies, we’re going to be doing the GMP manufacturing that’s needed to go ahead and file an IND,” Falk told Endpoints News.
And aside from its muscular dystrophy programs, Vita has an immunotherapy candidate, VTA-300, that it hopes to bring up from discovery to the preclinical stage as well, Falk noted. And it will be looking to add 10-15 employees to its current headcount of around 30.
On the FSHD front, previous attempts to treat the disease have seen little success.
In 2019, Acceleron scrapped its program after patients didn’t have functional improvements on the drug. And Fulcrum’s attempt with a drug targeting DUX4, licensed from GSK, failed a Phase II study — though the biotech is pushing onward with Phase III. But aside from Vita, there are a handful of early candidates. Just last week, Sanofi licensed an antibody-RNA conjugate for FSHD from miRecule, an NIH vet-led startup which also got $1 million from Solve FSHD. And Dyne Therapeutics has its own DUX4-targeted preclinical candidate.
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