Welcome to First 90 Days, a series dedicated to examining how pharma executives are planning for success in their new roles. Today, we’re speaking to Kaan Certel, chief business officer at Omega Therapeutics, an epigenomics company that recently made a deal with Novo Nordisk to tackle obesity.
Flagship Pioneering firms often grab media and investor buzz. And when a biotech launched by the venture capitalist nabs a Big Pharma deal in a burgeoning space like obesity — as Omega Therapeutics recently did — their profile gets raised even more.
The company’s epigenomic platform designs mRNA medicines that regulate gene expression to treat a range of diseases, including historically undruggable conditions. While its clinical pipeline has been geared towards oncology and immunology since its 2019 launch, Omega announced it’s working on an undisclosed novel therapeutic for obesity with Novo Nordisk earlier this year.
Under the deal’s terms, Novo will reimburse R&D costs and select one target designed to enhance metabolic activity to advance to clinical development. Omega and Pioneering Medicines — Flagship's in-house drug discovery and development unit — will receive up to $532 million in upfront, milestone and royalty payments. The partnership is a big get for Omega and may hint at the longer-term strategy for the company.
With the stakes raised, enter Kaan Certel, Omega’s new chief business officer who joined the team at the end of May, and is focused on forging new partnerships for the company.
“Big partners’ interest in our platform validates our approach in the eyes of the rest of the world,” Certel said.
Certel most recently served as chief business officer at BioCity Biopharma, a biotech developing oncology and chronic kidney disease assets. Prior to that, he was global head of oncology external innovation at Sanofi, where he spearheaded strategic collaborations. The experience with Sanofi has helped Certel learn the ins and outs of the commercial and scientific values needed to develop productive partnerships, he said. And his network, as well as his understanding of the internal governance process, guide his approach to the deal-making process.
“Taken all together, understanding the inner workings of large pharma enables the small biotech to get into the right door,” he said.
He joined Omega at a key crossroads for the company. In March, Omega announced its cutting 35% of its overall headcount in a cost reduction plan, which extends the company’s cash runway into 2025.
"All companies ... are undergoing reprioritization of their pipeline, repositioning of their pipelines, and that creates a lot of opportunities for a small biotech to step it up..."
Kaan Certel
CBO, Omega Therapeutics
The company said the plan will “sharpen” its focus on generating “meaningful clinical data” for its lead candidate, OTX-2002, which is in early-stage trials for hepatocellular carcinoma and other solid tumors associated with the c-MYC gene.
Here, we spoke to Certel about his focus at Omega, bouncing back from layoffs and what makes a good strategic partner.
This interview has been edited for brevity and style.
PHARMAVOICE: What's your focus coming into the new role?
KAAN CERTEL: The core center of the responsibilities is more in-licensing activities, out-licensing activities, and setting up potential collaborations of early-stage, late-stage collaborations with potential partners who would contribute to Omega their expertise and Omega would contribute to [with our] platform.
How would you describe the environment for finding new partnerships?
I see a lot of interest in partnership in multiple therapeutic areas. Oncology continues to move strong, but I think people are very excited and interested in the immune/inflammation space and cardiometabolism space. With all of the novel targets and novel biologies being discovered today, it's very active.
All companies, [including] Big Pharma, are undergoing reprioritization of their pipeline, repositioning of their pipelines, and that creates a lot of opportunities for a small biotech to step it up and help in those spaces.
Can you tell me about the obesity drug candidate in the pipeline in partnership with Novo Nordisk?
That deal was done just prior to me arriving at Omega, and it's an early stage target-based collaboration. The target has not been publicly announced … but we're very excited about that, because that's novel biology [and] we are able to demonstrate to the outside world that our technology is not just focused on one therapeutic space, but it can go into multiple therapeutic spaces and even a challenging space [such] as cardiometabolism.
Omega is not an oncology company, Omega is not a cardiometabolic company, Omega is not an immune/inflammation company. We have a very strong platform, and we have a great amount of know-how built around that platform. We will support our partners with our technology and our platform to help them get to where they need to get to in terms of drugging challenging targets that they know are very relevant in these disease spaces.
What makes a good partner for Omega?
We would love to take the technology into novel biologies, novel targets and those targets that have been very challenging to drug. We have the capability to target transcription factors which have been really challenging to target with pre-existing modalities. So those partners who are committed to innovation, those partners who have strong, validated targets, and are looking for ways of drugging those targets will be excellent partners for us and those we hope to learn from them, both from the scientific perspective and from the commercialization perspective.
The additional edge that we can bring is our connections and our way of really formulating the right storytelling to the other potential partners so that they understand and are excited about what we have to offer to them.
What is Omega’s strategy to bounce back after layoffs, and are you coming in to help reprioritize?
It's a very challenging time for all biotechs from the funding perspective. And one of the things about Omega is that … leadership knows how to navigate through those challenging times. We have a very strong belief in our platform, and we're very much focused on growing that platform, adding to our list of capabilities, and partnering with potential innovators to turn our platform into a drug machine.
I will again go back to the experience of leadership, not only through navigating these rough waters, but also in keeping the talent and maintaining the momentum even during these tough times. If you visited Omega today, if you walk the halls you will actually get a sense of the excitement of people here and their strong belief in the platform. And as we forge additional partnerships, that's obviously going to add more strength to the company moving forward.
