Incyte veterans band together for cancer start-up

Reid Huber and Wenqing Yao worked together at pharmaceutical giant Incyte for nearly 20 years, making their way up to chief scientific officer and head of discovery chemistry, respectively. But they’d always talked about striking out on their own.

Now the two have banded together, along with a handful of other Incyte scientists, to launch a start-up called Synnovation Therapeutics. And Synnovation has raised $102 million in a series A round led by Third Rock Ventures, where Huber is a partner.

Synnovation’s team, led by Yao as CEO, is working on three cancer drugs in parallel. The first two are poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) enzyme inhibitors, designed to be highly selective and to enter the central nervous system—a significant challenge for small-molecule PARP inhibitors.

The firm isn’t yet disclosing its third drug, but it says all three are progressing rapidly. The US Food and Drug Administration has already cleared SNV1521, the first PARP blocker, for a Phase 1 clinical trial, and Synnovation will test it in humans in a couple of weeks, Yao says. Assuming all goes according to plan, Synnovation could have three drugs in the clinic in about a year’s time.

“In order to play, you have to play to win. You have to identify not only new and important mechanisms, but you have to drug those with best-in-class approaches,” says Huber, who sits on Synnovation’s board. “First in the clinic is rarely first in class, and first in class is rarely best in class. So it’s really a game of [avoiding] obsoletion.”

Yao describes his team as “very patient drug hunters,” but they’ve still managed to work quickly, thanks to their in-house medicinal chemistry capabilities.

Yao was the second chemist to join Incyte back in 2002, and by the time he left in August 2021, he’d helped launch five drugs: Jakafi, for myelofibrosis and polycythemia vera; Olumiant, for rheumatoid arthritis, alopecia, and COVID-19; Pemazyre, for treatment-resistant bile duct cancer; Tabrecta, for non-small-cell lung cancer; and Opzelura, for eczema and vitiligo.

“I love Incyte. We built a world-class drug discovery team. But I’d been there for a long time—almost 20 years,” Yao says.

Yao secured seed funding for Synnovation at the end of 2021, but it took several months before he could begin doing any laboratory work, as the latest SARS-CoV-2 variant—Omicron—had disrupted supply chains. He finally got the equipment he needed in the first quarter of 2022, recruited chemists and biologists, and began working.

Several other Incyte veterans are among Synnovation’s leaders, including cofounder and senior vice president of drug discovery Liangxing Wu, head of biology Phillip Liu, and head of clinical development Kevin O’Hayer. The team currently numbers 27. Yao expects to hire another 20–25 people by the end of the year and 10 more in 2025 to support clinical development.

Synnovation doesn’t rely on third-party contract development and manufacturing organizations to, for instance, run assays and report back to the drug developers in Delaware, a process that Huber and Yao say can delay drug discovery by days or weeks.

“It doesn’t sound sexy because it’s not branded with a unique technology, but it’s important,” Huber says.