Hours After Debuting Biotech Startup Vor BioPharma, PureTech Launches Alivio Therapeutics

May 10, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff

Boston-based PureTech Health , a cross-disciplinary healthcare company that creates and spins out biotech companies, is having a very busy day. Earlier this morning, it announced the launch of Vor BioPharma, which is based on the research of Columbia University researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee, who is also the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

Now PureTech has announced the launch of Alivio Therapeutics, which will focus on treatments for inflammatory disorders. The company’s technology was developed by Jeff Karp, an associate professor at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), Harvard Medical School and Robert Langer, David H. Koch Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“There are dozens of diseases where inflammation plays a central role, and patients and their doctors are looking for better, longer-lasting treatments that offer relief,” said Michael Brenner, chief of the Division of Rheumatology, Immunology and Allergy at BWH and member of the Alivio Scientific Advisory Board, in a statement. “We are hopeful that the development of new technologies for delivering and sustaining treatment to inflamed tissue will allow us to manage chronic and acute inflammation with more precision and control.”

The company’s technology is a hydrogel that apparently sticks to inflamed tissue and can deliver drugs in response to the level of inflammation.

“What differentiates this technology is its potential to safely adhere to inflamed tissue while controlling drug release based on the amount of inflammation,” said Langer, in a statement. “These unique properties hold promise to change the way inflammatory disease is treated in a variety of indications.”

Karp and Langer are co-founders. Langer is a member of the Alivio board of directors. Michael Brenner will serve on the company’s scientific advisory board. He is the Theodore B. Bayles Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of the Division of Rheumatology, Immunology and Allergy at BWH. Ivana Magovcevic-Liebisch, will be director on the company’s board of directors. She is also senior vice president and head of Global Business Development at Teva Pharmaceuticals .

Ulrich von Andrian, a Mallinckrodt Professor of Immunopathology at Harvard Medical School, is also a scientific advisory board member. And Ralph Weissleder, a Thrall Professor of Radiology and Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, is also a member of the scientific advisory board.

“PureTech is excited to be advancing this important technology, invented by Jeff Karp and Bob Langer, and to be working with our extended team of experts to launch Alivio Therapeutics,” said Daphne Zohar, co-founder and chief executive officer of PureTech Health, in a statement. “There is a tremendous unmet need in inflammatory disease, so we look forward to progressing this platform, which has the potential to deliver drugs to inflammation in a new and meaningful way.”

Vor BioPharma and Alivio Therapeutics are the second and third companies launched by PureTech so far this year. In March, it started up Commense, which is based on work by NYU Langone Medical Center researchers. The focus of that company is on developing ways to prime, seed and maintain the microbiome of infants and children. It is largely built on the observation that babies delivered by C-section are not exposed to the same bacteria that children delivered vaginally are, which results in different development of the immune system. The company is working on novel therapeutics that mimic the vaginal-based flora microbiome.