By Marian Moser Jones
NEW YORK, July 11 - Monday's merger between short interfering RNA therapeutics firms Alnylam and Ribopharma started with friendly discussions between the management at the two companies, but was heavily influenced by venture capitalists' desire to establish a dominant presence in the market.
"I think all the venture backers saw it as an opportunity of building sort of an 800-pound gorilla in the space," said Alnylam CEO John Maraganore, "as opposed to separate financings for two separate companies that would ultimately be competitive."
The combined entity, which is for now called Alnylam holdings, secured $24.6 million in funding, giving it a total of over $43 million.
Additionally, the company now has 60 employees divided between the Alnylam headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., and Ribopharma's facility in Kulmbach, Germany. It plans to expand "modestly" from there, Maraganore said.
"By bringing the two efforts together, we are effectively building critical mass more quickly than either of us would have done separately," he said.
This 'critical mass' makes Alnylam Holdings as big as Sirna therapeutics, the only publicly-traded firm in the field, which raised $48 million in a PIPE financing that closed in mid-April.
But perhaps more important than dollar amounts raised and headcount is the IP position that the Alnylam-Ribopharma merger has created.
"Both of the companies, Alnylam as well as Ribopharma, have had basic IP for the use of siRNAs as therapeutics," said Roland Kreutzer, CEO of Ribopharma and the new COO of the combined company. "That's one of the major reasons for this merger: we think we can exploit this very good and leading IP position."
Alnylam has been granted exclusive licenses for therapeutic uses to a group of patent applications from MIT, the Max Planck Institute, the Whitehead Institute, and the University of Massachusetts Medical School that refer to the efficacy of short RNAs as sequence-specific mediators of RNA interference and degradation. (Tom Tuschl, Phillip Zamore, Phillip Sharp and David Bartel are among Alnylam's founders).
