Variant Bio Turns Five
This fall will mark five years since Variant Bio began its life as a genomic drug discovery company with a paradigm-changing mission — to fairly and ethically engage historically underrepresented populations in genomic research and use the resulting knowledge to develop life-saving therapeutics. In retrospect, that mission was ambitious on the part of myself, Stephane Castel, and Kaja Wasik, the scientific co-founders of the company. However, five years later, because of the hard work our team has put in, and the trust our partners and participating communities have placed in us, that mission no longer seems so far-fetched.
I’m extraordinarily proud of what we’ve accomplished to date and cannot wait to see what this next stage of the company will bring as we approach the clinic. At this point we’ve been able to take our findings from research around the world and move into the exciting next phase of drug discovery. We now have a pipeline with a program in lead optimization, getting us ever closer to the goal of delivering medicines to patients with diseases of great unmet medical need. In these last few years, we have also refined our priority therapeutic areas of interest to include inflammation-immunology, fibrosis, and kidney diseases. How did we come this far this fast, you might ask?
First, there is no way we could have gotten to where we are today without Variant Bio’s co-founder, Kaja Wasik. Prior to getting Variant Bio off the ground, Kaja received a PhD in genetics from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where we met, and was Chief Scientific Officer and a co-founder of Gencove, a genomic technology company that was the first to commercialize low-pass whole genome sequencing. While passionate about sequencing technology, Kaja wanted to apply this technology to do research with both scientific and moral impact. With Gencove well on its way after four years of scaling up their operations, Kaja felt that she had laid the groundwork as best she could and was ready to start a new venture.
The idea for Variant Bio began when I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the New York Genome Center. At the time, I was in the group of Tuuli Lappalainen, studying the molecular mechanisms underlying genetic associations to disease. It was clear to me that our approach would be incredibly powerful for genomic-based drug discovery, because it enables specific therapeutic hypotheses to be developed from GWAS, and evidence was already building that human genetics backed drug targets were over twice as likely to succeed in clinical trials. Indeed, many pharmaceutical companies had begun large-scale exome-sequencing studies to identify coding variants that were linked to disease and identify new targets. However, by focusing on just the small coding region of the genome, these studies were missing 90% of the puzzle, and leaving out potentially the most impactful discoveries. There was one more big problem — these studies focused almost exclusively on people of European ancestry, who represent just 15% of the global population. The currency of genetic studies is diversity: the more diversity, the more potential discoveries, the more opportunities to find novel causes of disease and ways to treat it.
While I was thinking about the potential applications of my academic research to drug discovery and Kaja was contemplating her next role, we met Josh Wolfe, co-founder and managing partner of the venture capital firm Lux Capital. Their thesis is to invest in cutting-edge science and technology companies that will have an outsized impact on the world of tomorrow — “We turn sci-fi into sci-fact” is their motto. Josh also saw the huge potential for genomics to transform drug discovery, and was looking for opportunities to invest in this space. We met and immediately hit it off. Josh’s boundless enthusiasm, creativity, and deep startup experience was a perfect match for Kaja and my scientific backgrounds, and in the fall of 2018 we founded Variant Bio with seed funding from Lux Capital.
The first few months of the company involved intense discussions about how on earth we were going to launch such an ambitious company. It was during that time that we made what would turn out to be one of our most important decisions. Rather than establishing a Board of Directors or Scientific Advisory Board as a first order of business as most startups do, we decided to establish an Ethics Advisory Board, and immediately began reaching out to thought leaders in the field of ethical scientific research. We are tremendously grateful to the countless experts who have dedicated their careers to promoting ethical research who took the time to talk to two naive founders about a very ambitious company. It is through these conversations that we developed two core tenets of Variant Bio — to carry out ethical genomic studies in a way that engages communities and respects their principles, and to share the financial benefits of that research back with them. In retrospect, these seem obvious, but at the time, few researchers and even fewer companies were considering or prioritizing these issues. The idea of benefit sharing in drug discovery was an entirely new one, and one that I’m extremely proud of Variant Bio for pioneering.
As Variant Bio matured, Kaja took the lead on identifying new partnership opportunities, and I focused on building a world-class genomic discovery platform to analyze the data from these partnerships. However, we realized that for the next stage, we needed a different type of leadership to run the company. Someone who understands how to build business partnerships and could operationalize our scientific proof of concept. Given how unique our company and mission was, it was going to be hard to find exactly the right person for the role. It was during this search for a Chief Executive Officer that we met Andrew Farnum, then the director of the Gates Foundation’s Strategic Investment Fund. In his role, Andrew’s team identified opportunities to invest in cutting-edge biotech startups whose technologies could be applied towards improving global health. As part of an investment from the Gates Foundation, companies had to commit to making their technologies or products available to low-income countries. Andrew had a keen eye for identifying these companies, and his team was an early investor in BioNTech, who would go on to develop one of the first mRNA based vaccines for COVID19. His ethical approach to biotech made him the perfect fit for our unique company. Kaja and I first met Andrew in New York in late 2019 and shared our vision for Variant Bio with him. After much success leading the Strategic Investment Fund, Andrew was looking for his next challenge, and was eager to move from the investment side to the startup side. In April of 2020, he officially joined as Variant Bio’s CEO.
We moved the company from New York to Seattle in 2020, and spent the next year demonstrating that we were able to form partnerships which yielded insights that allowed us to develop therapeutic hypotheses not possible from analyzing the same data from European-ancestry individuals that every other pharmaceutical company had access to. This set the stage for the next phase of our company, which would focus on turning these insights into drugs that would save lives, and was enabled by our successful Series B fundraising round.
Since the early days of Variant Bio, we have grown our team significantly to include top talent from the areas of drug discovery and development. Today, through the amazing work of our continuously expanding R&D team, we are harnessing the most promising of our research findings and translating them into key therapeutic programs. This year, the appointment of David Moller, MD, as Chief Scientific Officer, and Steve Bryant, PhD, as Chief Business Officer, signaled a new level of maturation of the company.
As a founder, I am motivated every day by the commitments we made to both participating communities and patients. To communities, we committed to carrying out genomic research with them, not on them, with a focus on health areas that would be impactful not only to the world, but also to them. We committed to come back once we develop drugs using discoveries that were made possible by their data contributions and to share the financial benefits with them to invest back into their communities as they see fit. To patients, I believe as scientists we have a moral obligation to use our expertise to make discoveries that will relieve the suffering of countless people around the world caused by diseases that could one day be treatable. Variant Bio now has active drug discovery programs in kidney disease, liver disease, and inflammatory disease and we owe it to patients to discover new treatments that will improve and save lives. It is an honor to work towards fulfilling these commitments, and there is nothing in the world I’d rather be doing. I’m incredibly proud of what Variant Bio has accomplished, and beyond excited to continue our journey.
