Ex-Onyx CEO Coles, MIT's Lindquist launch Yumanity

Former Onyx Pharmaceuticals Inc. CEO Tony Coles and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Susan Lindquist have teamed up to launch Yumanity Therapeutics LLC (Cambridge, Mass.), a newco targeting protein misfolding diseases. Yumanity will focus initially on neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

The company's three-part approach to drug development involves an ultra-high throughput phenotypic screening (uHTS) platform, a drug-target identification platform and stem cell-derived neurons from patients with disease-causing genetic mutations. The discovery platforms were developed in Lindquist's lab at the Whitehead Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. ...