This pharma startup backed by Y Combinator aims to treat multiple diseases, for good

Ira Spector has a working hypothesis that his startup’s drug can alter the course of disease in patients.

The CEO of Jenkintown, Pennsylvania-based SFA Therapeutics spent decades working in drug development, running up to 500 clinical trials in 70 countries a year. You’ve likely heard of some of the drugs developed by Spector — the antidepressant Effexor and the organ transplant drug Rapamune are among them. 

Now, the venture-backed SFA Therapeutics is developing multiple autoimmune disease-treating drugs, all based on a platform technology called SFA that was discovered by Mark Feitelson of Temple University, the startup’s chief scientific officer.

“We numbered [the drugs] one through nine,” Spector told Technical.ly. SFA-002, a psoriasis treatment, was the proof of concept that has shown that the drug has strong results. Ultimately, SFA has the potential to be a powerful treatment for multiple diseases, including some cancers.

SFA drugs are taken orally, in contrast to many existing treatments. But that’s not what really sets them apart, Spector said.

“What makes this so different is that at least in two cases, we have seen what’s called a durable response, meaning that after treating the patients for a long period of time, we withdrew the drug and the disease did not return,” he said. 

From small talk to startup

Developing drugs and bringing them to market is a long process.

 “We are an eight-year-old startup,” Spector said. His experience in the pharmaceutical industry before that includes helping to turn household conglomerate American Home Products into the pharmaceutical company Wyeth in the 1990s, eventually becoming its global VP for development operations before it was acquired by Pfizer in 2010.

Five years later, in 2015, Spector learned about the technology behind SFA Therapeutics out of the blue at a social event.

“It was the classic around the table, ‘what do you do?’ And the person I met before it was my turn was a professor at Temple University who said he had a drug for liver cancer and couldn’t get anybody interested,” Spector said. “I said, ‘Well, I helped develop drugs. I’ll come take a look.’” 

The professor was Feitelson, who impressed Spector with his work, which was showing promise for liver cancer treatment. Spector told Feitelson that if he could prove the drug works in humans, he was interested in forming a company. 

“By 2017 he had invited me back to the lab to meet another professor who he had been working with named Alla Arzumanyan,” he said. “Alla did the science that enabled us to go in humans and proved that it worked in three patients outside the US,” he said. 

The three, as well as current chief operating officer James Kirwin, formed the company the same year, with Arzumanyan as chief development officer.

“Our first investor was my wife and myself,” Spector said. “Our first official investor was a group called Ben Franklin Technology Partners,” a Pennsylvania state-funded VC.

In addition to Ben Franklin Technology Partners, SFA Therapeutics had some early angel investors and participated in the NYU Endless Frontiers incubator, and Y Combinator, after which it raised $4.1 million in one funding round. In total, the startup said it has raised about $8.8 million. With a valuation of $250 million, it is now in the midst of a Series A round worth $35 million, according to PitchBook. 

Among the conditions SFA Therapeutics’ pipeline of nine drugs are being developed to treat are pancreatic cancer, the rare eye disease uveitis and the liver disease MASH.

“We are replacing substances that healthy patients make, and patients with these diseases do not make, with a drug form, and that has the potential to help the body remodel and begin to make the substances on their own,” Spector said. “It’s very different from current drug developments, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m so excited about what we’re doing.”