During that interval, in 2009, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer signed a blanket agreement with QB3, an incubator for academic spinouts, with lab space spread across five sites in the Bay Area for early-stage biotech companies. When Spiros Liras, the former head of medicinal chemistry at Pfizer, read some of the papers Jacobson and Lokey produced, he thought that these peptides could be interesting to study and develop further. In 2011, Jacobson and Lokey signed an agreement with Pfizer to study these peptides in biological models to which neither of their labs previously had access. “Pfizer made their in vitro assays and animal pharmacokinetic tests available for our model systems,” Lokey says. “Formerly, we had just been doing the best we could with simple cell-free assays for permeability because we didn't have the other resources at all.” The scientists subsequently published a paper detailing the results (Nat. Chem. Biol. 7, 810–817, 2011).
After the paper had been published, however, Jacobson and Lokey did not immediately think to start a company. “I didn't know the first thing about starting a company,” Lokey says. “It seemed like such a massive undertaking, but QB3 has provided a lot of support and helped us walk through the initial stages.” Through QB3, the chemists were introduced to David Earp, a research scientist with business experience, and ultimately, a company called Circle Pharmaceuticals was established as a private entity based in San Francisco in May 2013. Earp is now the CEO and president of Circle. Although Jacobson's and Lokey's partnership with Pfizer ended officially in April 2015, the company still funds Circle's work. The continued collaboration with Pfizer and additional seed funding from San Francisco–based venture-capital firm Mission Bay Capital have allowed Circle to further the preclinical development of its therapeutics (Medchemcomm 3, 1282–1289, 2012; Curr. Top. Med. Chem. 13, 821–836, 2013). Circle has now set up shop in the South of Market district in San Francisco, a major start-up hub.
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