It was 2021, and biotech entrepreneur Wayne Sackett had just sold his last company, MyoKardia, to Bristol Myers Squibb for $13.1 billion. He was idly reading Nature Genetics, “like all good curious chemical engineers do,” he says, when he came across an interesting paper out of Stefan Somlo’s lab at the Yale School of Medicine. Somlo had found that, in mice, reactivating inactive Pkd genes could reverse the progression of autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD), wherein cysts develop on kidneys and limit their function.
Fascinated, Sackett reached out to the Somlo team. Within a few months, he was on a plane from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lives, to New Haven, Connecticut. By 2022 he’d convinced the lab to let him form a new company around the technology, focused completely on kidney disease.
