Blackfan Circle Innovations Announces First Project Agreement
5/4/2022
BOSTON — Blackfan Circle Innovations, LLC, a company created by Deerfield Management to facilitate a research collaboration with Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), announced today the first project agreement to advance BCH researchers’ innovations towards the development of a clinical therapeutic. Under this project agreement, Blackfan Circle will provide the funding and operational expertise to drive the advancement of a novel gene therapy in collaboration with the laboratory of Friedhelm Hildebrandt, MD.
Dr. Hildebrandt, Chief of the Division of Nephrology of Boston Children's Hospital, and a Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, has made pivotal contributions to the field of pediatric kidney diseases. His research is concerned with the identification and functional characterization of recessive single-gene causes of kidney diseases in children and his group has identified over 80 novel kidney disease genes and delineated the related pathogenesis.
“The recent discovery of over 200 monogenic recessive causes of chronic kidney disease opens up the possibility of devising scalable gene replacement approaches, rather than having to develop small molecule drugs to hundreds of different targets,” stated Dr. Hildebrandt.
“We are excited to launch Blackfan Circle’s first drug discovery project alongside Dr. Hildebrandt” said Mike Foley, Joint Steering Committee Member at Blackfan Circle Innovations, and Chief Executive Officer Discovery and Development, and Vice President of Translational Drug Development at Deerfield. “This project exemplifies the kind of transformative research that Blackfan aims to push forward and highlights our strategic commitment to gene therapy as a key therapeutic modality to address unmet medical needs.”
The collaboration between Blackfan Circle Innovations and BCH is designed to partner Boston Children’s Hospital researchers with Deerfield’s expert drug discovery and development team, Deerfield Discovery and Development (3DC), to advance novel therapeutics from early stages of drug discovery through an Investigational New Drug (IND) application. Deerfield may also provide additional capital to fund successful start-up companies that spin-out of Blackfan Circle.
Blackfan Circle uses a multi-phase process to select which projects to fund, with rigorous review of both the scientific merit and commercial viability of the therapeutic concept. For approved projects like Dr. Hildebrandt’s, a joint team works in partnership to develop a multi-year, milestone-driven workplan and budget aimed at translating the novel research into a clinical candidate. Principle Investigators (PI) focus on research activities in their specific area of expertise while Blackfan Circle leverages Deerfield’s considerable drug development expertise and scale.
Blackfan Circle will be hosting an informational session on May 17, 2022 at 3PM. If you are interested in attending, please register here.
About Blackfan Circle
Blackfan Circle Innovations was formed in 2020 with the goal of translating the work of Boston Children’s Hospital biomedical researchers and accelerating innovation for potential commercial biopharmaceutical uses. Deerfield is providing up to $65 million in funding as well as operational support to jointly selected research initiatives with the objective of achieving Investigational New Drug (IND) readiness.
For more information, please visit blackfancircle.com or reach out to
Sabrina Kamran at Sabrina.Kamran@childrens.harvard.edu.