Ascidian Therapeutics CEO Michael Ehlers is leaving the venture investor that serves as his home base and will join MPM BioImpact as an entrepreneur-partner on Monday, the investment firm told
Endpoints News
.
Ehlers will help MPM create new startups, find investment opportunities and assess clinical development, regulatory and commercial strategies at its portfolio biotechs.
For the past five years, Ehlers has been chief scientific officer at venture investor and biotech incubator Apple Tree Partners, better known as ATP. He also helped found multiple ATP portfolio companies, including the RNA biotech Ascidian.
He’ll remain in the CEO role at
Ascidian
, which in January became the
first company
to get FDA clearance for human trials of RNA editing. MPM is not an investor in Ascidian, Ehlers confirmed.
“Something I’ve always been impressed by at MPM from the outside is just the depth and rigor of the science, the really critical eye toward the future: in other words, the kinds of technologies and programs that are going to matter, not just today, but five to 10 years down the road,” Ehlers said in an exclusive interview.
He said he’s excited by computational-based methods that are spreading across the industry, RNA biology and RNA modality advancements, improvements in gene editing and the convergence of technologies. New approaches to “classic areas” like small molecule drug discovery are also intriguing, Ehlers said.
“It’s just a smorgasbord of things to be able to do, and MPM is just a perfect venue or a perfect platform to be able to do it,” Ehlers said.
“There is so much opportunity,” Ehlers said. “It’s a little bit like walking to the Old Country Buffet and trying to figure out which flavor of pudding and Jello you’re going to get when there’s too much.”
Ehlers was a neurobiology professor at Duke for about a dozen years and then an investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute before switching to industry in 2010, when he joined Pfizer. He eventually became the pharma giant’s chief scientific officer for neuroscience and then was executive vice president of R&D for Biogen until 2019.
At ATP, he helped form Ascidian,
Aulos Bioscience
,
Replicate Bioscience
and
Intergalactic Therapeutics
, a non-viral gene therapy biotech that shut down last year. MPM said Ehlers will continue serving on the boards of Aulos and Replicate.
Ehlers joins MPM after a string of recent financings, including Carolyn Bertozzi-associated ADC biotech
Firefly Bio
and Alzheimer’s startup
AstronauTx
.
Neuroscience continues to intrigue him.
“It is an area with lots of opportunity and it remains one of the big submerged icebergs,” Ehlers said. “There’s massive unmet medical need in that area, and that’s not going away anytime soon.”
