An Atlas-founded biotech quietly shut down this week, with the CEO posting only a short statement on LinkedIn to announce the move.
Triplet Therapeutics is no longer operational, chief exec Nessan Bermingham said on the social media site Tuesday, less than three years after it launched. In December 2019, Triplet debuted with a $59 million Series A, nabbing cash from Atlas, MPM Capital and Pfizer Ventures in an effort to develop antisense drugs for Huntington’s disease.
“It is with great sadness we announce the closure of Triplet Therapeutics,” Bermingham’s statement read in part. “We want to thank all the employees, advisors and investors that supported the company in addition to CHDI who not only was a great partner and patient advocate but also stepped in to continue the Natural History Study (Shield-HD) that we had initiated.”
Atlas declined to comment, pointing to Bermingham’s LinkedIn post. The news was first reported by STAT.
Triplet had been attempting to investigate the DNA damage response pathway and how it could be targeted with antisense oligonucleotides to treat Huntington’s and other similar diseases, known as repeat expansion disorders. At the time of launch, Triplet said it had found a few key drivers (out of 100) that showed the potential to stop the insertion of genetic repeats.
But early last year, Roche shuttered a Phase III trial looking at an antisense Huntington’s treatment known as tominersen. Just one week later, the biotech Wave Life Sciences also scrapped an antisense drug for Huntington’s, citing a failure to separate from placebo in impacting the mutant Huntingtin protein at any of the dosage levels.
Those failures prompted Triplet’s investors to back out right around the time the biotech sought to put together a Series B round, STAT reported.
Huntington’s continues to thwart everything researchers throw at it, and Triplet is just the latest company to wave the white flag in this space. But by shutting down completely rather than pivoting, the biotech took a more drastic step in the wake of its defeat. Bermingham also pointed to toxicity issues in his statement emerging from the antisense tech, making a path forward difficult.
“Suffice to say the underlying science of targeting repeat expansion disorders through MSH3 knockdown remains a viable approach from our vantage point,” the CEO wrote, “however the data with our lead compound reflected prior experiences with ASO tox in the CNS.”