Emerging Drug Developer: Bind Biosciences

Bind Biosciences hopes to get big on small tech

Somewhere between leaving the top job at Acceleron Pharma and jumping onto the start-up Bind Biosciences, Glenn Batchelder (pictured) learned anew that a willingness to embrace rapid change is an absolutely essential requirement for success in biotechnology.

“I think flexibility in this environment is probably one of the better assets to have,” he says, with barely a hint of irony.

A list of close connections helps too.

So it was that Batchelder’s contacts at Polaris Ventures Partners, which was backing Acceleron, alerted him to the opportunity at Bind, which was also supported in a seed round by Flagship Ventures – another Acceleron investor.

“It was something that Bob Langer and Omid Farokhzad had been working on and thinking about for some extended period of time,” says Batchelder, referring to Bind’s scientific founders, the MIT Institute professor and Harvard Medical School assistant professor of anesthesiology who had studied under Langer. “Bob has started a number of companies with Polaris as an initial investor.”

One of those companies was Momenta Pharmaceuticals, which raised $275 million before going public three years ago. That was one big attraction for Batchelder. Another lure was the opportunity to get in on the ground floor.

“This is my sweet spot in terms of what I do regarding stage of company,” he says.

“People have been thinking about this concept of delivering a targeted payload for decades,” adds Batchelder. “It turns out that there are a series of physiological challenges that need to be overcome to effectively deliver a targeted payload. You need to have particles accumulate at the site of the disease and as they migrate through the body they should stay below the radar of the immune system. Then they have to bind with specificity and release in a controlled and reproducible fashion.

Nanotechnology can play a big role here. By reducing therapeutics to microscopic sizes and putting them in nano-sized packages that can be delivered right on target, researchers can change the compound sufficiently to gain ownership of the newly constituted drug while the rifle approach skirts the collateral damage of shotgun therapies like chemotherapy. It’s not unusual to find research teams beavering away at advancing new nanoparticles that can do just that.

Where Bind breaks new ground, says Batchelder, is by using its technology to build a combinatorial library of particles that can be cherry-picked for each new program. They don’t have one nanoparticle in the lab; they can have a whole string of them. For now, there are two programs in preclinical development for oncology and cardiovascular disease, and Batchelder isn’t going into any detail on how those work – yet.

The polymers that are in the Bind lab are already well understood. And by reformulating approved drugs, says the CEO, the biotech can also rely on compounds that have a proven safety profile.

“We’re taking polymers and approved drugs and finding a way to change how they concentrate more where you want them as opposed to less,” says Batchelder. “It’s a dramatically de-risked program.”

Bind has the chance to develop its own therapeutics, with two of the best known scientists in the field actively working to make it succeed. And Cambridge, MA-based Bind can forge partnerships with other biopharma companies that would like to advance their own nanotechnology programs. Bind already has one small partnership pact completed, says Batchelder, who’s also playing that card close to his vest. Others are in the works, and that non-dilutive cash should play a significant role in funding Bind’s future growth.

Polaris and Flagship together got the company off the ground with a seed round of $2.5 million at the beginning of the year. A few days ago, they were joined by Arch Ventures and NanoDimension in a $16 million Series B.

Right now, Bind has 15 staffers and is planning to hire on about five more by the end of this year. Top staffers include Stephen Zale, Ph.D., the vice president of development and Jeff Hrkach, Ph.D., vice president, pharmaceutical sciences. By the end of next year, when Bind is planning to be on the verge of entering the clinic with its first program, Batchelder expects payroll to grow to the low 30s.

Long-term, Batchelder says he’d like to grow Bind into an industry powerhouse, with a public listing somewhere in the future. And if that doesn’t work out, he can be flexible.