Jared Gollob, M.D., who headed up clinical development and medical affairs at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, is joining Kymera Therapeutics, a startup focused on protein degradation. As chief medical officer, Gollob will lead the company’s clinical strategy and organization.
Gollob's appointment comes nearly a year after Kymera bagged a $30 million series A from the likes of Atlas, Amgen Ventures and Lilly Ventures. At the time, the startup brought on industry veteran Laurent Audoly, who has served in various roles at Pierre Fabre, Pfizer, Merck, MedImmune and Pieris.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech aims to use the body’s innate protein degradation system—the ubiquitin-proteasome system—against disease-causing proteins. The company is using this “disease-agnostic” platform, dubbed Pegasus, to pursue treatments for cancer and autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.
“We are rapidly advancing our first drug candidate toward the clinic, and thrilled to welcome Jared to the Kymera team to support our move to become a fully integrated biotech company," Audoly said. "Jared brings invaluable experience in drug development and leveraging novel discovery platforms to successfully launch new therapies for patients. He also has incredible depth of knowledge in translational immunology and tumor biology—key areas of focus for the company."
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Gollob’s move comes about six weeks after Alnylam’s first product, the RNAi drug Onpattro, cleared the FDA after the company spent 15 years in R&D mode.
"It's exciting to find myself once again at a new frontier in drug discovery," Gollob said in a statement. "I was compelled by the rigor of Kymera's science, team and plan and the incredible sense of urgency to turn this exciting technology into meaningful therapeutics for patients."
Shortly after raising its series A, Kymera inked a partnership with GlaxoSmithKline. The two-year discovery deal will focus on small molecule-based targeted protein degradation and encoded library technologies. The pair didn’t elaborate on the financials or targets.
Kymera isn’t alone in the protein degradation space—Celgene, C4 Therapeutics, Arvinas and Cedilla Therapeutics are all pursuing therapies in this area.
It’s the Pegasus discovery platform that sets Kymera apart, the company previously told FierceBiotech:
“Powered by a proprietary predictive modeling capability and a truly novel integrated degradation platform, Kymera is accelerating drug discovery and development with an unmatched ability to identify, target and degrade the most intractable of proteins.
“Kymera’s differentiated platform consists of informatics/disease centric target identification, a novel E3 ligase toolbox, proprietary ternary complex predictive modeling capabilities and degradation tools that allows us to efficiently identify and render tractable disease-causing proteins underserved by current therapeutic modalities and to design novel protein degraders with the greatest potential to impact disease.
“Our pipeline, focused on key clinically validated pathways coupled with our ability to interrogate different biology within each pathway contribute to the uniqueness of our platform.”