The twisting journey of Pretzel Therapeutics’ top brass appears to have come full circle, with the biotech subsuming the very company where some of its senior figures once worked.
Pretzel’s CEO and co-founder Jay Parrish, Ph.D., as well as its chief operating officer Baruch Harris, Ph.D., both served stints at Rome Therapeutics in their varied careers before the formation of Pretzel in 2022.
The idea behind Pretzel was to “pioneer a new era in the treatment of diseases related to mitochondrial dysfunction,” Parrish said at the time. The company launched with a $72.5 million series A and last year was able to take its lead bioenergetics restoration therapeutic into the clinic.
Back at Rome, things haven’t been going quite as smoothly. In September, the preclinical biotech—which has been working on reverse transcriptase inhibitors and tumor antigens—revealed it was planning layoffs in the face of “current challenging market conditions.”
Boston-based Rome employed 14 people at the time, with a spokesperson telling Fierce that an undetermined number would be laid off within weeks in an effort to reduce spending. Alongside these plans, the biotech said it expected to forgo its brick-and-mortar location and transition fully to a “virtual model.”
Things then went quiet at Rome until Monday, when the company’s CEO Rosana Kapeller, M.D., Ph.D., announced via a LinkedIn post that Rome had “been winding down its operations—a process that formally concluded a few weeks ago.”
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What’s more, Rome will now operate as a fully owned subsidiary of Pretzel, with the continuing input of Rome’s scientific co-founders David Ting, M.D., of Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, and Benjamin Greenbaum, Ph.D., of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
“The science we championed is not ending—it is continuing,” Kapeller wrote. “It is moving into new environments and into the hands of leaders who will carry it forward with the same rigor, curiosity, and conviction.”
It marks a subdued end to Rome’s saga, which began when the company debuted in 2020 with $50 million and a goal to drug previously hidden parts of the “dark genome.” The biotech followed up the next year with a $77 million series B fundraise that later tacked on an additional $72 million with the backing of major players like Johnson & Johnson and Bristol Myers Squibb.
Rome’s closest asset to clinical development was an inhibitor of the LINE-1 reverse transcriptase that successfully lowered autoantibodies in mouse models of autoimmune disease in 2023.
