Avila Therapeutics - 2010 Fierce 15

Based: Waltham, MA
Founded: 2007
Website: www.avilatx.com
CEO: Katrine Bosley

The Scoop: Better protein silencing technology can create better, longer acting therapies, and Avila Therapeutics thinks it has the inside track on using its technology to develop new drugs that create durable bonds with their targets. Lots and lots of targets. Like others on this year's aggressive Fierce 15 list, Avila isn't waiting until it has mid-stage data in hand to start striking deals. It is relying on an innovative platform technology to move fast on new pacts to identify new drug candidates--inking deals and generating revenue before its lead drug ever hits the clinic.

What Makes It Fierce: Back in May, Avila struck a $209 million partnership deal with Clovis Oncology, one of our Fierce 15 companies from the class of 2009. Clovis was looking for a touch of the covalent bonding science that Avila has mastered to find a better candidate to treat non small-cell lung cancer cases--an epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutant-selective inhibitor--that prove resistant to current therapies. Avila's bonding approach promises to spare healthy tissue.

Avila has another pact in place with the Novartis Option Fund (again totaling more than $200 million) as well as the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, which is providing more than $3 million to get AVL-292, a lead therapy for B cell cancers which inhibits B cell receptor signaling, into the clinic. But Avila isn't restricting itself to cancer. The developer also has two candidates in mind for hepatitis C--AVL-181 and AVL-192 targeting the NS3 protein--believing that its ability to create better bonds can deliver a best-in-class drug for one of the world's biggest disease categories.

Avila owes a lot to the computational skills of co-founder Juswinder Singh, who earlier led the computational chemistry efforts at Biogen Idec. "He literally started the company in his basement, says CEO Katrine Bosley, who brought her own biotech business-building skills to the mix.

Singh built the Avilomics platform, Bosley helps bring in the partners to use it on a broad range of targets. "If someone is interested in a targeted area, we'll know if it's a good fit for the technology," she notes. "We see the tide turning. The industry is accepting covalent drugs, seeing as we do it's an exciting new approach which can solve problems you can't solve with other technologies."

Clovis made a good match for Avila. It was launched by a team of experienced oncology executives, with strong financial backing of its own. "They totally knew what they were doing," says Bosley.

"Capital is never cheap and it's particularly restrained these days," says the CEO, who has 28 staffers on payroll with plans to add more. "But with a platform company you always have to be really careful of the balance; what you do with partners and what you are keeping for yourself. You've always got a new idea."

Venture Backers: Partnership money has helped add to a cache of venture cash. A year ago The Novartis Option Fund led Avila's $30 million B round. All existing Avila investors participated: Abingworth, Advent Venture Partners, Atlas Venture and Polaris.