Managing Editor

So far, it looks like 2007 Seattle-based start-up Kineta Inc. is beating the odds.

Despite being founded a year before the global economy hit the skids and setting up a development plan based on translational research, an area that investors had been shying away from in favor of later-stage opportunities, the firm has roughly tripled in size and continues to find funding sources, most recently a $2.8 million Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for antiviral work.

Its success to date stems mainly from its founders, biotech veterans Charles Magness and Shawn Iadonato, who previously co-founded Illumigen Biosciences Inc., a genetics/genomics company bought by Cubist Pharmaceuticals Inc. in 2007. Lexington, Mass.-based Cubist didn't need Illumigen's Seattle facility, so the two entrepreneurs brought other members of the team back together to form Kineta.

At that time, the "marketplace was evolving," said Meg O'Conor, director of corporate communications, who noted that Magness and Iadonato "had a spectacular way of seeing the future."

For starters, they decided that Kineta would focus on early stage work. "We really wanted to focus on what we saw as the most high-demand portion of the drug development cycle: preclinical through the so-called valley of death," said Magness, who heads the company as CEO. "Big pharma has really retreated from this part of the development cycle, and we need biotech firms to really shepherd that early development."

Though Magness and Iadonato had relied on the traditional start-up route via venture capital with Illumigen, they opted for other funding sources this time around. Magness described it as a "four-legged stool," comprising private equity, contracts and grants such as its recent NIH award, foundations such as the Iacocca Family Foundation, which is funding work on Kineta's diabetes program, and corporate collaborations like the deal Kineta has with MPI Research Inc., a toxicology lab in Michigan.

To keep its investor timelines short, Kineta applies a project-based financing strategy, putting each program into a separate subsidiary and getting it into early clinical development before looking at licensing, partnering or selling the program.

"It doesn't really make sense to ask people to tie up their money for 10 years," Magness told BioWorld Today, adding that "it's hard to pick a winner in early stage [development]. So when we started doing this three years ago, it seemed a much more efficient way."

Kineta's pipeline includes both in-licensed and platform programs in the areas of immunology and antivirals.

The company's lead immunology program, ShK-186, acquired from Airmid Corp. and the University of California, Irvine, is aimed at multiple indications, including multiple sclerosis (MS) and Type I diabetes and could have applications in other autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease and psoriasis. The drug is designed to target effector memory T cells, the cells that instigate the autoimmune damage process by attacking what the body has mistakenly identified as foreign.

"These T cells sit on the periphery and wait for something to come along," Magness said. They then use the Kv1 .3 channel both to enter the fray and to stay active, so ShK-186 is aimed at blocking that channel, thereby stopping that inflammatory process. But it does so without blocking the entire immune system, a characteristic that could give it an edge over existing therapies.

In MS, for instance, "there haven't really been any big advances," Magness said, pointing out that many of the drugs that work also have safety issues because they suppress a patient's entire immune system, leaving the subject vulnerable to infections.

"We believe that blocking only this one subset will result in a lot less toxicity, while being a more potent peptide," he added.

Kineta is wrapping up GLP toxicity studies with ShK-186, with Phase I testing anticipated to begin around the first part of 2012.

The company's lead antiviral program actually originated at Illumigen and was reacquired from Cubist last year. It's a recombinant protein that demonstrated potential against several viruses, including hepatitis C, influenza, respiratory syncytial virus and other RNA viruses. The compound, rOAS1, is designed to work not by attacking a specific virus, but by targeting the immune system to improve the immune response against the virus.

That program also is gearing up for Phase I trials.

Earlier in its pipeline, Kineta is in lead optimization screening for drugs targeting the retinoic acid inducible gene I (RIG-I) protein. Magness described the RIG-I program as "more of a platform" that could yield multiple candidates against a range of infectious diseases. Kineta has called RIG-I the "molecular on/off switch that triggers the human body's innate immune defenses against viruses."

Though still early stage, the potential of RIG-I already has attracted interest; the recent $2.8 million in NIH funding is earmarked for developing drugs targeting RIG-I for indications such as dengue fever and the common cold.

All of its programs are focused on novel mechanisms of action, Magness said. Kineta is looking for "potentially disruptive, substantial improvements, not just incremental improvements."

The company also has gotten government funding for an adjuvant program, plus a separate contract for a computerized drug discovery effort aimed at speeding up the discovery process by mining data available publicly through efforts such as the Human Genome Project.

Kineta has about 21 full-time employees.