CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — It's been three days since Cristina Csimma moved into her company's first office space, and already she is planning to relocate. The cofounder and chief executive of Cydan Development, the first drug accelerator focused on advancing therapies for rare diseases, points from a top floor conference room across the tree-lined courtyard outside to her company's future home at 700 Technology Square. “The space is very long and thin,” Csimma says of what will become Cydan's new headquarters toward the end of September. “I call it Chile.”
For Csimma, the dimensions of the physical space the company will move into matter less than the location. “What's important is being in a biotech and university hub in Tech Square,” she says. Her hope is to take advantage of the local drug-development know-how—as well as biomedical expertise from around the world—to rapidly generate a handful of promising start-ups in the orphan disease space, as well as to equip those nascent firms from the get-go with drug candidates with a high degree of clinical—and financial—success, all in an economically efficient manner. Recent advances in the understanding of the molecular underpinnings of rare diseases, including genetic targets, as well as a large unmet need in the patient population has made this area of medicine enticing for investors and researchers.
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