Mark Levin likes to tell the story of how his Newbury Street venture capital firm, Third Rock Ventures, was born at a blackjack table in Las Vegas. He was playing at the Bellagio with two friends from his days as chief executive of Millennium Pharmaceuticals. All three were lamenting the timidity of pharmaceutical and venture capital firms when it came to putting money behind risky, but potentially high-impact scientific breakthroughs.
“What we were discussing was who would come along to fill that hole,” Levin says. “We all said, this is an interesting time to go out and grow great companies from the beginning.”
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Nice piece, Scott. Boston is where things are happening in biotech startups! Third Rock have smart people. Lou knows that "Brown Fat" is THE weapon against obesity and diabetes. Note that Energesis Pharmaceuticals uses approach (to treat obesity and diabetes) that's COMPLEMENTARY to Ember Therapeutics' : we enhance recruitment of NEW brown adipocytes from endogenous reservoir of stem cells found in skeletal muscle. This is a physiological process that is defective in most obese, (pre-)diabetic patients (probably due to genetic predisposition x environment); we aim to RESTORE normal brown fat recruitment, leading to restoration of lower, healthy body weight/fat and glucose metabolism. The efficacy in animal models of diet-induced obesity and diabetes is strongly established, and correlative evidence in humans is extremely strong.