How it started
History
The company was formed in June 2003 in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a Delaware corporation; the original name was Phoenix Pharma.
The founders were scientists Jasbir Seehra, Tom Maniatis, Mark Ptashne, Wylie Vale, and scientific advisor Joan Massague, and business people and investors John Knopf, Larry Bock and Christoph Westphal of Polaris Venture Partners, who served as founding CEO. The company was founded to discover and develop drugs based on the scientific discoveries of the scientific founders in the field of growth factors and transforming growth factors in the fields of metabolic disorders like obesity, diabetes, osteoporosis, and muscle-wasting conditions.
The company began with a seed round from Polaris of $250,000 and then had a Series A venture capital investment of $25 million that it used to open its first laboratory in December 2003.
Glenn Batchelder was appointed president and CEO in June 2004.
It started its first clinical trial in June 2006; the product was ACE-011 (which eventually was named "sotatercept"), a protein therapeutic that was an activin type 2 receptor antagonist intended to treat bone loss. ACE-011 was a chimeric protein, created by fusing the binding portion of the activin type 2 receptors to part of an antibody; the resulting protein binds to activin and prevents it from acting.
From Wikipedia’s article on Acceleron Pharma, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3