Constellation Pharmaceuticals, a US-based molecular therapeutics company backed by Genentech and GlaxoSmithKline’s corporate venturing unit, has appointed Keith Dionne as chief executive officer.
Dionne has succeeded Mark Goldsmith, who was made Constellation chief executive in 2009, who will become executive chairman. Goldmsmith is also joining Constellation investor Third Rock Ventures as a partner in its San Francisco office.
Dionne joins Constellation from Third Rock, where he was entrepreneur-in-residence. He previously worked as chief executive of Surface Logix, which sold to research and development company Nano Terra last year, and diabetes and inflammatory disease drug developer Alantos Pharmaceuticals, which sold to healthcare company Amgen for $300m in 2007.
Constellation in January signed a strategic agreement worth $95m with Genentech, a subsidiary of the Roche pharmaceutical conglomerate.
Genentech and Constellation planned to launch a collaborative partnership based on Constellation’s epigenetics science, which will lead to treatments being developed to combat cancer and other serious diseases. Genentech also has the option to acquire all outstanding shares in Constellation, should it choose to do so in future.
The funding will be made up of an upfront payment followed by research financing over a three year period. Additionally, Constellation will be in line for milestone payments as well as double digit royalties on a range of Genentech products developed from the collaboration.
Prior to the deal, Constellation had raised a total of $69m from SR One, the corporate venturing fund operated by pharmaceutical conglomerate GlaxoSmithKline, as well as venture capital (VC) firms Venrock and the Column Group, VC fund Third Rock Ventures, and Altitude Life Science Ventures, one of the growth funds representing the Southern Ute Indian Tribe. Constellation was founded in 2008 by epigenetics academics Danny Reinberg, professor of biochemistry at the New York University School of Medicine, Yang Shi, professor of pathology at the Harvard Medical School and David Allis, professor at The Rockefeller University.
Consellation’s research is focused on epigenetics – the study of how genetic marks cause genes to express themselves when passed down the generations – to develop medical treatments that work by manipulating proteins to ‘switch on or off’ the genes being affected by various diseases and restore them to normal expression.