When Moncef Slaoui, Ph.D., resigned as co-leader of Operation Warp Speed last month, he said it was time to "move on and go back to my private life and private business." Now, he’s revealing his next act: Centessa Pharmaceuticals, an amalgamation of 10 biotech companies that starts out with $250 million and Bristol Myers Squibb veteran Saurabh Saha, M.D., Ph.D., at the helm.
(Medicxi)
Founded by Medicxi, Centessa’s name is based on the words “centric” and “asset,” which also describe its modus operandi. The hope is to create a pharma company—a world Slaoui and Saha know well—but without the R&D inefficiencies that strike “classical pharmaceutical companies,” said Centessa co-founder Francesco De Rubertis, Ph.D., a partner at Medicxi and chairman of Centessa’s board of directors, in a statement.
"Our operations will be driven by an asset-centric approach, whereby each Centessa Subsidiary is solely focused on the execution of its programs with oversight from the highly experienced Centessa management team," De Rubertis said. “The ambition of applying asset centricity at scale is to be able to deliver life altering medicines to patients with improved efficiency by boosting R&D productivity.”
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The 10 Medicxi companies that merged to become Centessa will continue to develop their assets under the leadership of the Centessa team as well as with access to centralized resources such as manufacturing, regulatory and operational support. Its programs span cancer, hematology, immunology, inflammation, neuroscience and rare diseases and include four clinical-stage projects, with more than 10 others following behind.
With $250 million from the likes of General Atlantic, Vida Ventures and Janus Henderson Investors at Centessa’s disposal, its subsidiaries can focus on the science without worrying about fundraising.
“This approach encourages an environment where scientific teams are incentivized to maintain an unwavering focus on advancing medicines to key go/no-go inflection points based on data-driven decisions," said Saha, previously senior vice president of R&D and global head of translational medicine at BMS.
Centessa’s pipeline includes efforts such as monoclonal antibodies for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and systemic sclerosis, developed by Capella BioScience, and small-molecule degraders of STAT3 and STAT5, brought in by Janpix, for the treatment of blood cancers.
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“In creating Centessa, we have strategically assembled our subsidiary portfolio to include programs with strong biological validation, mechanistic diversification, and teams with proprietary capabilities and insights," said Slaoui, chief scientific officer and adviser of Centessa, in the statement. "This high quality portfolio aims to deliver enhanced diversification, reduced risk and asymmetric upside with a view to withstanding the inherent low probability of success associated with drug development.”
If this story sounds familiar, it’s similar to the “hub-and-spoke" models used by companies such as BridgeBio Pharma and ElevateBio. The former looks for potential rare disease treatments shelved in academic labs and develops each program in subsidiaries with access to centralized resources, while the latter is building cell and gene therapy companies also with centralized resources, including an R&D and manufacturing team.