Clinical-stage biotech company Yumanity is laying off about 60% of its workforce Corporate Restructuring This comes a month after the FDA placed a partial clinical hold on its lead program, a potential Parkinson’s disease treatment.
Restructuring involves more than laying off workers to save cash. Boston-based Yumanity said Thursday that it is now exploring “strategic alternatives,” which could include mergers, licensing deals or the sale of the company or its assets.
Yumanity’s drug discovery technology is based on yeast. The biotechnology uses yeast cells to mimic protein folding, a hallmark of neurodegenerative diseases. These models are screened against molecular libraries to find models that protect cells from the toxic effects of misfolded proteins that are characteristic of neurological diseases. The technology is licensed from MIT’s Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
Parkinson’s disease is characterized by the aggregation of a misfolded form of a protein called alpha-synuclein. While several companies are developing drugs to break these aggregates, Yumanity is taking a different approach. YTX-7739 is a small molecule that penetrates the blood-brain barrier to block the activity of stearoyl-CoA desaturase, an enzyme that catalyzes lipid metabolism reactions. This approach is designed to block the intracellular toxicity associated with alpha-synuclein accumulation, allowing neurons to function normally.
The second state-of-the-art program in the Yumanity pipeline, YTX-9184, is chemically different from YTX-7749, but is designed to target the same enzymes. The molecule is in preclinical development as a potential treatment for dementia with Lewy bodies. Two other programs targeting undisclosed targets are in preclinical development in collaboration with Merck.
Yumanity has advanced its key assets into early clinical development: a Phase 1 study testing a single ascending dose in healthy volunteers, and multiple ascending dose studies in healthy volunteers, including evaluating Parkinson’s patients of multiple ascending doses of the Phase 1b ingredient. Last month, the company disclosed that the FDA has placed Partially held This can affect multiple-dose testing of the drug. Regulators have allowed single-dose clinical trials of the drug. Yumanity did not specify which questions or concerns the FDA raised.
At the end of 2020, Yumanity had 44 full-time employees, with 32 in research roles, according to the company. annual report. At the end of the third quarter of 2021, the company said it had a cash position of $43.5 million.In its financial report for the quarterYumanity said it expects its cash to last less than 12 months.
“If we are unable to raise additional capital through equity or debt financing or other arrangements when needed, we may need to delay, reduce or cancel our product development or future commercialization efforts, or grant the right to develop and market our desired product candidates Otherwise, prefer to develop and market it yourself,” the company said.
The layoffs, expected to be completed in April, will result in a one-time charge of about $400,000 recorded for the quarter, Yumanity said Thursday. Among Yumanity’s strategic options for going public included a vehicle to take another company public, a move known as a reverse merger. Yumanity goes public in 2020 Reverse merger with ailing cystic fibrosis drug developer Proteostasis.
Yumanity closed Thursday at $1.26, down 28.8% from Wednesday’s close.
Image: Dr. Microbiology, Getty Images
