Start-up to drug multiple proteins at once

A trio of biotech and pharma executives with backgrounds in computational chemistry and systems biology are making a bet: that new computational tools will allow them to go after multiple protein targets with just one drug. Former Merck & Co. executive Bruce Beutel, computational chemist and serial entrepreneur Soumya Ray, and systems biologist and former Biogen leader William Chen joined forces about 2 years ago to found a start-up called Passkey Therapeutics. They launched the Cambridge, Massachusetts–based firm publicly this month and announced it had raised $20 million in seed funding led by Breakout Ventures. Passkey’s play is a class of drug candidates the start-up calls SMThs—pronounced “smiths” and short for “synergistic multifunctional therapeutics.” The drug candidates are designed to target pairs or groups of proteins that cause disease when they work together. “The industry’s pretty dominated by a single-protein-as-a-target paradigm. You pick one protein that’s associated with a disease,