The Life Of Helicon Therapeutics, Inc.
Helicon
Helicon was the mountain in Greek mythology where Apollo played with the Muses.
Helicon Therapeutics, Inc. was founded in July 1997 initially as a collaboration among Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, OSI Pharmaceuticals and Hoffman-LaRoche Pharmaceuticals. Helicon's core technology derived from studies of Drs. Tim Tully and Jerry Yin at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who in 1995 showed that upregulation of the CREB (cyclic AMP response element binding protein) transcription factor in fruit flies could enhance long-term memory formation. Also in 1995, Petrij et al. published the discovery that patients with Rubinstein-Taybi Syndrome (RTS; a heritable form of neurodevelopmental disorder) carried mutations in CBP (CREB Binding Protein). While under the direction of Helicon's first CEO, Dr. Walter Lovenberg, this collaboration ended in July of 1999.
Memory
The Muses were the guardians of Art and Science, and the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the Titan Goddess of Memory. Spranger (16th Century)
In 1999, Helicon confirmed and extended the memory enhancement seen in Drosophila to mice by administering a small-molecule inhibitor of PDE4 (HT-0712). Also in 1999, Oike et al. published a mouse model of RTS and showed that learning and early memory were normal but long-term memory failed to form in mutant CBP mice. Helicon in-licensed the mutant CBP mice, and then Bourtchuladze et al. published in 2003 that HT-0712 was able to ameliorate the long-term memory impairment in mutant CBP mice. In 2000, a patent application was filed on the concept of Augmented Cognitive Training (ACT), which generalizes the concept of memory enhancement to a broader application for cognitive rehabilitation.
In late 2000, under the direction of Helicon's second CEO, Mr. George Carmany, the company secured new funds from a group of private equity investors. Dr. Jonathan Gelles then joined Helicon's BOD to represent this new investor interest. Mr. Carmany also succeeded to recruit the ex-CSO of Neurogen (and neighbor on Long Island), Dr. John Tallman, to become the third CEO of Helicon in 2001.
Mnemosyne
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), the famous artist during the Pre-Raphaelite Era 1848-1914, painted a bust of Mnemosyne in 1881 and wrote a poem referencing a lamp of memory.
Thou fill'st from the
winged chalice of the soul
Thy lamp, O Memory,
fire-winged to its goal.
This couplet was inscribed upon the frame of the picture entitled Mnemosyne, or The Lamp of Memory
Mr. Kenneth Dart saw an article in Forbes magazine about Dr. Tully (and Dr. Eric Kandel) in February 2002 and decided to visit Dr. Tully at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Mr. Dart arrived with his father, William Dart, and his attorney, Kenneth Johns and spent a long day discussing the future of research on memory. Shortly after this meeting, Mr. Dart began investing both in Dr. Tully's research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and in Helicon. For the latter, he and Mr. Johns joined the Helicon BOD in 2002.
While limiting growth to control the burn rate, Helicon succeeded in 2004 to open an IND on HT-0712 (PDE4) . Less than a year later, Helicon hired Dr. Tom Blackburn as VP of Clinical Development, who then successfully in-licensed HT-2157 (GALR3) from Lundbeck (Synaptic) in 2005. After the sudden death of Dr. Tallman in 2006, Dr. Blackburn was named interim CEO of Helicon.
In 2007, Dart Neuroscience LLC was founded, and Dr. Tully resigned his position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to become DNS's first Chief Science Officer. The decision was made at that time for DNS to locate in San Diego, and the Helicon BOD decided to follow suit. Mr. Johns then became Helicon's fifth CEO in 2007, when Dr. Blackburn resigned. Helicon opened its San Diego doors for business in February 2008, while DNS's facilities became operational in August 2008. Also at that time, Helicon sold to DNS its research effort to focus capital on its growing clinical effort. To that end an IND for HT-1067 (MAO-B) was filed in spring of 2009.
For more than three years, Helicon and DNS collaborated to advance their R&D (respectively). The move to San Diego greatly improved Helicon and DNS's ability to grow by hiring excellent, experienced scientists from the surrounding biotech/pharma community. With this growth in human capital and a rigorous drug development pipeline, Mr. Dart bought out the remaining Helicon shareholders in 2012, and Helicon was merged with DNS.
