GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE:GSK) is closing down Massachusetts company Sirtris Pharmaceuticals five years after the pharma giant paid $720 million to acquire the company researching treatments for diseases of aging.
Sirtris workers in Cambridge who learned of the news tipped FierceBiotech, which was first to report the news. The Sirtris research operations will be integrated into GSK’s R&D. GSK spokeswoman Melinda Stubbee told Fierce that an undetermined number of Sirtris’ 60 workers will be given the opportunity to relocate to the Philadelphia area, where GSK has a large presence. GSK’s U.S. headquarters are in Research Triangle Park.
“I think that the research they’ve done has been very successful and has moved on to a point where R&D leadership felt it was time to move it to the next phase,” Stubbee told Fierce.
Jim Ellis, who is currently the vice president of preclinical research, has been appointed to lead the research, Stubbee said. The current chief executive, George Vlasuk, will be looking to do something else within GSK. Sirtris’’ research aimed to use resveratrol, a chemical found in red wine, to activate an enzyme called SIRT1. But the work has not turned into a pipeline of drug candidates. Sirtris and GSK have proceeded so far on just one Phase 1B study recruiting patients to test the compound SRT2104 to fight inflammation in ulcerative colitis.
Sirtris stopped developing two other drug candidates after early human testing, Vlasuk told Fierce. He said scientists have been working on improving their understanding of anti-aging mechanisms in an effort to create more potent SIRT1-activating compounds to take into human studies.
Last week, Harvard scientists released study results supporting resveratrol’s case as a tool for protecting against aging-related diseases. David Sinclair, Harvard Medical School genetics professor and the senior author of the study, was the senior author of the study. Sinclair’s research led to the founding of Sirtris.
But two years after GSK acquired Sirtris, GSK shelved development of the lead compound from that acquisition, SRT501, when the medicine didn’t appear to work well enough in cancer patients and worsened kidney damage.
Resveratrol is currently being tested in at least two dozen clinical trials to gauge its effects on human health. It’s also packaged as a natural supplement, with $34 million in U.S. sales last year, according to the Nutrition Business Journal. Further doubt was cast on resveratrol’s abilities after a prominent researcher and promoter of the compound, Dipak Das, who was the director of the University of Connecticut Health Center’s cardiovascular research center, was found to have fabricated and falsified data in numerous studies.
Overall, not enough evidence currently exists to recommend the compound for the prevention of lifestyle diseases, such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease, the 2nd International Science Conference on Resveratrol and Health, held in December at the University of Leicester, England, concluded. Still, its effects in animals shouldn’t be dismissed, Ole Vang, chairman of the conference’s scientific committee, told Bloomberg News in an e-mail.
“Several markers for various cancers, coronary heart disease as well as diabetes are clearly reduced in experimental animals by resveratrol,” Vang wrote. “So it does have a promising effect in these models, but we can’t translate this promising effect directly to humans.”
More research is needed to test whether patients can benefit from these studies, he said.
That’s will happen, but the work will be done within GSK, not Sirtris. Rather than wait to see what Sirtris develops, GSK decided to take on the Sirtris research to see if it can find promising drug candidates.
(Bloomberg News contributed to this report)
