PharmaTelevision - Synta Pharmaceuticals: Strategy and Pipeline

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Video title: Synta Pharmaceuticals: Strategy and Pipeline

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In this exclusive interview, Fintan Walton talks to Safi Bahcall, President and CEO of Synta Pharmaceuticals. They begin by discussing Synta's origins, and how the company was established through the research of Harvard and MIT scientists. Safi talks about Synta's lead anticancer product and explains its mechanism of action, as well as reviewing the current state of the company's pipeline. He expands upon the terms of Synta's major agreement with GlaxoSmithKline and the interview concludes with a discussion of Synta's growth strategy.

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Synta Pharmaceuticals's origins, portfolio and going public.

Fintan Walton:

Welcome to Pharma ventures business review brought to you by Pharma television the world's first on demand pharmaceutical television channel. We are here in San Francisco recording a series of interviews at the annual JP morgan conference. This conference we originally run by the famous hambrecht and quest bank and is one of the oldest events in biotechnology. Today thousands descend from around the US but also from around the world into San Francisco to do financial deals and recently it's also become a important partnering event. I hope you enjoy the series of interviews we have done from some of the key companies attending this conference. Hello and welcome to Pharmaventures business review here in San Francisco. On this show I have Safi Bahcall who is president and CEO of Synta pharmaceuticals based in lexicon Massachusetts, welcome to the show.

Safi Bahcall:

Thank you very glad to be here.

Fintan Walton:

Safi Bahcall, your company is somewhat interesting in the sense that it was originally a management buyout or spinout out of some of the research activities that Shionogi the Japanese company had. Could you tell us a little about that story and how that how that birth happened?

Safi Bahcall:

Sure and most most biotechnology companies in the united states startup as backed by venture capitalists or with the scientists with an idea typically from university. We really have a different origin and history which lead to actually I think a very different profile of the company and that's something a lot of people have noticed about Synta. But as you say there was sort of ten years of investment by two different Japanese companies in what eventually became Synta. So they invested in developing what was really a US based research subsidiary in collaboration with two scientists one from Harvard and one from MIT to use their chemical compounds, libraries and chemistry expertise combined with a biology expertise of the scientists at Harvard and MIT to set up a research operation in Lexicon Massachusetts and they worked for ten years and developed really a pretty phenomenal discovery.

Fintan Walton:

How big was the actual portfolio at that time?

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Safi Bahcall

President and Chief Executive Officer

Dr Safi Bahcall co-founded Synta with Dr Lan Bo Chen and has been Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors since July 2001, and President since December 2003. He has led Synta from its inception through multiple acquisitions, financings, an IPO, and the establishment of an integrated drug discovery and development organization, including five unique programmes in development. Before founding Synta, Dr Safi Bahcall was a consultant at McKinsey & Company, serving investment banks and pharmaceutical companies on strategy, technology and operations. Dr Safi Bahcall also founded a drug discovery company focused on novel ion channel research, which is now part of Synta. He received his BA summa cum laude from Harvard University, was awarded his PhD from Stanford University in theoretical physics, and was a Miller postdoctoral fellow at University of California Berkeley.

Synta Pharmaceuticals

Synta Pharmaceuticals is a biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering, developing and commercialising novel pharmaceutical products for extending and enhancing the lives of patients with severe medical conditions, including cancer and chronic inflammatory disease. Synta has a unique chemical compound library, an integrated discovery engine, and a pipeline of small molecule drug candidates with novel chemical structures and distinct mechanisms of action.