When Sam Truex turned out the lights at Quench Bio, she is­sued a heart­felt post out­lin­ing the rea­sons be­hind why the for­mer in­flam­ma­to­ry dis­ease play­er closed its doors. That bold hon­esty was ap­pre­ci­at­ed some­where as Truex will now jump aboard a fa­mil­iar team at At­las Ven­ture to give star­tups the best pos­si­ble chance at suc­cess.

At­las has tapped Truex as its newest ven­ture part­ner, the firm an­nounced on Mon­day. To­day is her first of­fi­cial day on the team. And her first as­sign­ment? Lead­ing a stealthy At­las-backed start­up that em­ploys most of the team from Quench.

“We built a team at Quench Bio that I was quite proud of build­ing to­geth­er with the oth­er lead­ers, and that team has want­ed to stay to­geth­er for the most part,” she said, adding that she’ll lead the plat­form com­pa­ny un­til they find a long-term CEO.

Quench said it was wind­ing down op­er­a­tions in ear­ly March, af­ter a cou­ple failed at­tempts at tar­get­ing the gene Gas­der­min D to treat in­flam­ma­to­ry dis­eases. The Cam­bridge, MA-based biotech said the gene proved “un­drug­gable” with their tech­nol­o­gy, and auc­tioned off its re­search to keep oth­er Gas­der­min pro­grams mov­ing for­ward.

Truex told End­points News that she ful­ly in­tends to take the helm at an­oth­er biotech — but for now, she’ll help At­las get oth­er com­pa­nies off the ground while choos­ing the one that’s a good fit for her.

“What I’m hop­ing to do next is work in a com­pa­ny where the ther­a­pies that we’re work­ing on are al­ready in or near the clin­ic,” she said. “I would like to get back to a fo­cus that’s more heav­i­ly on pa­tients and clos­er to de­liv­er­ing ther­a­pies to pa­tients.”

While this marks the first time Truex has been em­ployed by At­las, she’s worked with the VC firm in var­i­ous ca­pac­i­ties since 2014, when she be­came CBO of au­toim­mune-fo­cused Pad­lock Ther­a­peu­tics. Be­fore that, she spent rough­ly eight years each at Gen­zyme and Bio­gen.

Michael Gilman

Michael Gilman, who found­ed and helmed Pad­lock, said he was “thrilled to con­vince Sam to come on­board.” Two years lat­er, she led the com­pa­ny through a $600 mil­lion buy­out by Bris­tol My­ers Squibb, which was at­tract­ed by the biotech’s pro­tein/pep­tidyl argi­nine deim­i­nase (PAD) in­hibitor dis­cov­ery pro­gram.

“Sam is smart, strate­gic, fo­cused, and has a tremen­dous ca­pac­i­ty for work. Most im­por­tant­ly, she’s moral­ly ground­ed, with a strong sense of right and wrong and deep pas­sion for the caus­es she be­lieves in,” Gilman told End­points in an email. He’s now in Waltham, MA, lead­ing Ar­rakis Ther­a­peu­tics’ pur­suit of small mol­e­cule med­i­cines that di­rect­ly tar­get RNA.

Truex went on to serve as COO and head of cor­po­rate de­vel­op­ment at Syn­log­ic, be­fore start­ing at Quench Bio in 2018. The Dart­mouth grad said there were oth­er op­por­tu­ni­ties she could have tak­en af­ter Quench, but none seemed like the “per­fect fit.”

Bruce Booth

“So I thought: Why not work with the peo­ple I know and al­ready re­spect to start some­thing that will be the per­fect fit?” she said.

Bruce Booth, an At­las part­ner who’s worked with Truex at both Pad­lock and Quench, called the new hire a “great leader and ex­pe­ri­enced se­r­i­al en­tre­pre­neur.”

“Hav­ing worked with her across mul­ti­ple star­tups, she’s proven her­self to be an ac­com­plished ex­ec­u­tive who leads with in­tegri­ty,” Booth said. “She al­so in­spires all of us with her com­mit­ment to giv­ing back to the com­mu­ni­ty. It’s a re­al priv­i­lege to have her join At­las to help us build the next gen­er­a­tion of star­tups.”

Tadataka Yamada, a towering physician-scientist who made his name in academia before transforming drug development at GlaxoSmithKline and developing vaccines for malaria and meningitis at the Gates Foundation, died unexpectedly of natural causes at his home in Seattle Wednesday morning.

He was 76. Frazier Healthcare Partners’ David Socks confirmed his death.

Known widely by the mononym “Tachi,” Yamada had a globetrotting career and arrived in industry relatively late in life. A 2004 Independent article noted GSK had asked Yamada to stay on beyond his approaching 60th birthday, the company’s usual retirement age. Yamada would continue working for the next 17 years, steering the Gates Foundation’s global health division for 6 years, funding Jim Wilson’s gene therapy work when few would touch it, launching Takeda Vaccines and co-founding a series of high-profile biotechs.

When a drugmaker raises the price of a drug in the US by more than 2,000% overnight, and without any particular reason for that increase, nothing typically happens to the company. No fines, no court orders, just business as usual.

Martin Shkreli’s decades-old anti-parasitic drug Daraprim was the perfect example — massive price spike on an old drug, lots of media attention, public outcry, Congressional committees dragging his former company through multiple hearings, and at the end of it? Nothing happened to the price or the company (until generic competition came).

Before Valneva garnered the favor of the UK government as a potential supplier of Covid-19 vaccines, the French biotech prided itself on being the first company to bring a chikungunya vaccine into Phase III.

It now has positive pivotal results to back up the breakthrough therapy designation the FDA granted just weeks ago.

There are currently no approved jabs to prevent chikungunya virus infection despite decades of R&D efforts, a fact that underscores just how arduous traditional vaccine development can be, particularly for neglected tropical disease. In a absence of a major commercial market, the US government and NGOs such as CEPI have deployed various grants and incentives to spur on a small crew of academics and industry players, with Merck, via its acquisition of Themis, claiming a spot in that race.

As former synbio unicorn Zymergen picks up the pieces from its spectacular implosion Tuesday, an outstanding loan from Perceptive Advisors — the only blue-chip biotech crossover investor to touch Zymergen’s fundraising efforts — could make the situation worse, according to public documents.

In December 2019, more than a year before Zymergen filed for what would eventually become a $500 million IPO, the “biofacturing” firm signed a $100 million credit facility with Perceptive to help supplement the nearly $700 million the company had raised across four VC rounds.