VANCOUVER, British Columbia- Reverb Therapeutics, a leader in the emerging paradigm of redirecting endogenous cytokines as treatments for life-threatening diseases, debuts with seed financing led by founding investor Amplitude Ventures and participation from the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation’s venture philanthropy arm, the Myeloma Investment Fund.
Reverb Therapeutics is advancing its novel antibody-based AmplifierTM platform to treat a broad range of diseases with endogenous cytokines that naturally occur within the body. Instead of using heavily engineered exogenous cytokines to treat disease—which have consistently presented challenges such as systemic toxicity, immunogenicity and challenging production requirements—Reverb’s antibodies redirect endogenous, natural cytokines to cells of interest. This approach avoids the systemic exposure and risk of immunogenicity seen with most exogenous cytokine treatments. The company plans to use the current seed round to bring two programs to the candidate stage. Reverb’s lead pipeline programs harness IL-15 to activate specific immune cells and to target a broad variety of cancers.
“We are keenly aware of the clinical obstacles to more widespread use of exogenous cytokines to treat patients,” said David de Graaf, Ph.D., Co-founder and CEO of Reverb Therapeutics. “Reverb’s proprietary Amplifier antibodies utilize standard IgG frameworks along with advanced computational modeling and antibody engineering to build first-in-class novel therapeutics. The platform is designed to be modular and to use elements of existing and novel antibodies to redirect a given cytokine to a specific tumor, tissue or immune cell. It is broadly applicable across solid and liquid tumors and auto-immune diseases.”
“We’re excited by the potential of Reverb’s Amplifier platform for the treatment of multiple myeloma,” said Michael Andreini, President and CEO at the MMRF. “The emerging preclinical data suggest that this highly differentiated platform approach to cytokine therapy could be promising for myeloma patients.”
“There is a lot of activity in the cytokine space,” said Bharat Srinivasa, Principal at Amplitude and co-founder of Reverb. “Reverb’s proprietary Amplifier platform stands out. It is elegant and straightforward, uniquely capable of using endogenous cytokine biology to create drugs with increased efficacy.” Amplitude Ventures co-founded Reverb through its Pre-Amp venture studio program. As part of the financing, Bharat Srinivasa and Ali Tehrani, Partner at Amplitude, have joined Reverb’s board of directors.
Founding team and SAB
Reverb is founded and led by a team of seasoned executives with decades of experience in discovering and developing biologics. The team is responsible for more than 12 late-stage clinical programs and two marketed products. The team includes:
- David de Graaf, Co-founder, President and CEO is a serial biopharma entrepreneur, having co-founded and led more than 5 companies in his career from founding to late-stage clinical development. His experiences include being CEO at Abcuro, Comet (acquired by VectivBio) and Syntimmune (acquired by Alexion) and leadership roles at Apple Tree Partners, Flagship Pioneering, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim.
- Surjit Dixit, Co-founder, CSO is an experienced science leader, and was Chief Technology Officer at Zymeworks where he conceived and directed development of the firm’s best in class Azymetric™ bispecific platform, which has generated multiple pharma partnerships and Zanidatamab, the leading biparatopic antibody being evaluated in registrational clinical trials.
The company is also supported by an outstanding scientific advisory board. The SAB includes:
Peter Sorger, D. Phil., Head of Therapeutic Sciences and Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard University;
Fred D. Finkelman, M.D., Professor of Medicine at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine
Peter Zandstra, Ph.D., Founding Director of the School of Biomedical Engineering, University of British Columbia;
John Burke, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Applied Biomath.
