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GSK absorbs controversial ‘longevity’ company

Pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) will close Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, a firm intent on developing compounds that stave off age-related disease — and one of GSK’s most contentious acquisitions.

Sirtris’s research programme and lead compound are to be absorbed by GSK’s drug-discovery machine, with some employees relocated from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Sirtris has been based, to GSK’s facilities in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The news was first revealed yesterday by the blog FierceBiotech and immediately spurred speculation that GSK, headquartered in London, had lost faith in Sirtris, which GSK snatched up in 2008 for a whopping US$720 million.

But GSK spokeswoman Melinda Stubbee says that the move is a step forward for Sirtris’s approach to developing compounds that activate a protein called sirtuin-1 (SIRT1). “We’re excited about this move, which signals that Sirtris has made substantial progress in sirtuin biochemistry and that their work is ready to evolve to refinement of promising sirtuin interactors,” she said. Integrating into the larger company will grant the programme better access to GSK’s chemistry, biology and pharmacology teams, she said.

That’s unlikely to quell rumours of Sirtris’s demise, however. For years, Sirtris has been a company pharmaceutical insiders loved to hate. GSK’s decision to acquire the company came as the pharmaceutical industry shifted its focus from internal research to outside acquisitions — a move that created thousands of layoffs for pharma scientists.

Sirtris has stood as a stark symbol of that change in philosophy, particularly because GSK invested heavily in the company even after GSK’s internal scientists failed to substantiate Sirtris’s claims that compounds such as resveratrol, a molecule found in red wine, directly activated SIRT1. (Just last week, sirtuin researchers published an explanation for the discrepancy.)

Pharmaceutical researchers interpreted GSK’s enthusiasm for Sirtris as another sign that executives had lost faith in their internal teams, and the layoffs that followed only bolstered this view.

Since then, pharma watchers have been scrutinizing Sirtris for any sign of failure. And the high-profile sirtuin field, ravaged with debates about everything from biochemical assays to biological significance, has provided plenty of opportunities for schadenfreude.

Stubbee says that GSK aims to move Sirtris’s lead compound, SRT2104, into the clinic in the next 3–4 years. The company has abandoned some of its earlier compounds, but it is hard to say from the outside whether this is a sign of trouble, as some inevitably have branded it, or simply the uncertain nature of drug discovery. As for SRT2104, Stubbee says that clinical trials of the drug so far have shown it to be well tolerated but have been designed to test the biology of SIRT1 activation in different disease settings, not the efficacy of the drug against disease.

So, it seems, sirtuin-watchers may have more news to look forward to as the molecule progresses in the clinic.

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