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Main Line-based former Warp Speed chief rolls up 10 gene therapy start-ups into one ambitious firm

Ex-Glaxo vaccines chief is back in business with his old investor-partners

Then-President Donald Trump listens as Moncef Slaoui, a former GlaxoSmithKline executive, speaks about the coronavirus at White House event last year.
Then-President Donald Trump listens as Moncef Slaoui, a former GlaxoSmithKline executive, speaks about the coronavirus at White House event last year.Read moreAlex Brandon / AP

Fresh from his seven-month public role as top scientist at Operation Warp Speed, former President Donald Trump’s effort to rush COVID-19 vaccines to market, Moncef M. Slaoui is back in the money-making end of the biotech business.

Slaoui, a Gladwyne resident and former boss of vaccines at drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, is the new chief scientific officer of Centessa Pharmaceuticals, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company that has raised a quarter of a billion dollars from Slaoui’s former venture capital employer and other investors. They used the initial investment to buy 10 biotech start-ups in England, Germany, Canada, Boston, and the Philadelphia suburbs.

The new company’s founders say it offers a new model for cutting costs in drug research and development, a notoriously expensive gamble of a business.

Centessa was formed by Medicxi, a Swiss investment firm where Slaoui was a partner after leaving Glaxo in 2017.

The 10 start-ups bought to form Centessa all have had promising early test results, fight diverse diseases, and are run by teams with special knowledge and abilities, Slaoui said in a statement.

With so many different drugs on the way, the new company offers investors “reduced risk” and the possibility that one or more big hits will enrich them, cutting the “inherent low probability of success associated with drug development,” Slaoui added.

The start-ups include Palladio Biosciences, a firm based in Newtown, Bucks County, that has been developing lixivaptan, a drug to suppress polycystic kidney disease.

Palladio raised $20 million last year from Medicxi and Samsara BioCapital, two of the investors now backing Centessa. Other backers include Philadelphia-based Osage University Founders, plus a unit of Swiss drug giant Roche, owner of Philadelphia’s most successful biotech start-up in recent years, Spark Therapeutics.

Palladio’s chief medical officer is Neil H. Shusterman, a former Penn medical professor and kidney specialist, who was also top medical officer at Malvern-based Endo Pharmaceuticals. The chief executive is Alex Martin, who, along with Slaoui and Shusterman, worked earlier at what is now GlaxoSmithKline.

Other newly acquired Centessa subsidiaries include Massachusetts-based Janpix, which is developing drugs to treat leukemia and lymphoma; Germany-based PearlRiver Bio, which is developing a lung cancer treatment, and PegaOne, whose drug imgatuzumab targets skin cancer; and Canada-based Z Factor, which is building a protein-based liver enzyme-deficiency treatment.

The other five Centessa companies are based in London or nearby cities: ApcinteX, developer of hemophilia treatment SerpinPC; Capella BioScience, which is developing treatments for lung fibrosis and lupus; LockBody, researching ways to stimulate the immune system to fight tumors; Morphogen-IX, engineering human bone protein to treat high blood pressure; and Orexia Therapeutics, which treats narcolepsy and other sleep disorders.

Joining 10 labs under a single financial group “aims to reduce some of the key R&D inefficiencies” that slows work and boosts costs at big drug companies, Francesco De Rubertis, the Medicxi cofounder who chairs the Centessa board, said in a statement. He said Centessa’s managers will oversee researchers at each lab to cut costs and speed development.

So many investors wanted a piece of the deal, the $250 million investment was “oversubscribed,” Medicxi said.

The largest investors joining Medicxi include General Atlantic, a New York private-equity firm; Vida Ventures, Boston; and Janus Henderson Investors, London. Other investors include Boxer Capital of San Diego; Cormorant Asset Management of Boston; and the T. Rowe Price, Wellington, and Franklin Templeton mutual fund groups.

Despite skeptics who doubted vaccines could be ready for market before the end of last year, industry analysts say Warp Speed played a role in speeding the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to market, and to a lesser extent the Pfizer vaccine.