The Column Group has provided $50 million in Series A financing for a new company called Tenaya Therapeutics, which plans on focusing on regenerative medicine and developing medications to treat heart failure.
The Gladstone Institutes, a research and training facility based in San Francisco, announced the new company in a Dec. 6 news release.
Deepak Srivastava, MD, director of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, is one of Tenaya’s co-founders. The other co-founders include Gladstone investigators Benoit Bruneau, PhD, Bruce Conklin, MD, Sheng Ding, PhD, and Saptarsi Haldar, MD, as well as Eric Olson, PhD, from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
“When heart muscle is damaged, the body is unable to repair the dead or injured cells,” Srivastava said in a news release. “Right now, the only possible cure for heart failure is a heart transplant. We hope that this new venture will bring us closer to a more scalable cure.”
David Goeddel, PhD, a managing partner at the Column Group, will serve as the chairman of the board for Tenaya. Goeddel is a former scientist at Genentech and the co-founder of a pharmaceutical company that Amgen acquired in 2004.
Meanwhile, JJ Kang, PhD, an associate at the Column Group, will serve as the company’s president and be on the board. Kang earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her PhD at the California Institute of Technology. She worked at FibroGen before joining the Column Group last year.
The Column Group is a venture capital firm that invests in early stage drug discovery companies.
Tenaya Therapeutics is the first company formed from BioFulcrum, which the Gladstone Institutes launched in January 2015.
“There has been limited commercial investment in the cardiac field, despite the remarkable progress made at Gladstone and elsewhere,” Stephen Freedman, PhD, vice president for corporate liaison and ventures at Gladstone, said in a news release. “Tenaya will advance some of the innovative work coming out of Gladstone, with the aim of developing new therapeutics for heart failure.”
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Tim Casey joined TriMed Media Group in 2015 as Executive Editor. For the previous four years, he worked as an editor and writer for HMP Communications, primarily focused on covering managed care issues and reporting from medical and health care conferences. He was also a staff reporter at the Sacramento Bee for more than four years covering professional, college and high school sports. He earned his undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Notre Dame and his MBA degree from Georgetown University.