He started at the bench, making molecules. Then he learned to close deals. Now he runs a company built around a single gene.
Terrence Connolly. A chemist who spent years making compounds before deciding which one was worth a company.
Most biotechs sell you a platform - a technology that could, in theory, produce many drugs against many diseases. Terry Connolly's K36 Therapeutics sells you a gene. It is called NSD2, also known as MMSET, and it is an epigenetic switch: a piece of cellular machinery that decides which genes get read. In certain cancers the switch gets stuck in the on position, and the tumor stops responding to the drugs meant to stop it. K36 exists to switch it off.
That is an unusually narrow thing to build a company around, and Connolly has kept it narrow on purpose. K36 is roughly thirteen people. It has two compounds in the clinic, both oral small molecules aimed at the same target. KTX-1001 is being tested in multiple myeloma patients who carry a genetic rearrangement called t(4;14). KTX-2001 is being tested in men with prostate cancer that has stopped responding to hormone therapy. Same biology, two diseases.
The pitch, reduced to its core, is a claim about reversal. Late-stage tumors usually go one direction: they get more resistant, never less. Connolly's argument is that blocking NSD2 can push a resistant tumor back toward being treatable - can make it listen to the standard drugs again. He calls this kind of reversal "extremely rare," which is both the scientific interest and the commercial bet. If it works, K36 has something the field has been looking for. If it doesn't, it is a thirteen-person company that ran a clean experiment and got an answer.
Connolly took the CEO job in 2021, the year K36 came together, and he also sits on its board. The money behind him is not casual. The $70 million Series B was led by Nextech Invest, a precision-medicine investor, and Bristol Myers Squibb participated - the same Bristol Myers Squibb whose investigational drug mezigdomide K36 is now combining with KTX-1001 in trials. When a large pharmaceutical company both invests in your target and lends you its pipeline to test alongside, that is a form of endorsement that is hard to fake.
NSD2 is a clinically meaningful, targetable and druggable driver of treatment-resistant prostate cancer.- Terrence Connolly
Described as the only clinical-stage inhibitor of MMSET, aimed at myeloma patients with the t(4;14) translocation - a population that responds poorly to existing therapies. Now in expansion cohorts, including combinations with carfilzomib/dexamethasone and with BMS's mezigdomide.
A selective oral NSD2 inhibitor being studied in the STRIKE-001 Phase 1 trial for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer - the expansion of K36's single-target thesis into a second, larger disease.
The typical biotech CEO comes from one of two directions. There is the scientist who founded around their own discovery and had to learn the business on the way up. And there is the dealmaker who can raise money and structure partnerships but has to trust others on the science. Connolly is neither, or rather he is both, in sequence.
He started with a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Ottawa and an honors chemistry degree from Mount Allison, and he spent the early part of his career in process chemistry - the work of actually making the compounds, figuring out how to produce a molecule at scale, at Roche, then Wyeth, then Celgene. That is about as close to the bench as pharma careers get.
Then, at Celgene, he crossed over. He moved into business development and alliance management, learned to evaluate other people's science and put a price on it, and rose to Executive Director of Business Development, where he led the evaluation and execution of more than twenty-four transactions. By the time he was running the business side at Skyhawk and Dragonfly, he had seen the whole pipeline - from a reaction flask to a signed collaboration - which is a useful thing to have seen if your job is to decide which single molecule is worth building a company on.
Tumors typically don't revert once they develop resistance. This one might.
He holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Ottawa and an honors chemistry degree from Mount Allison University.
K36 runs with roughly thirteen employees - a deliberately small company organized around a single molecular target.
He worked both sides of pharma: making the molecules early on, then closing the deals - an unusually complete tour of the industry.
At Celgene he moved from making compounds to closing more than two dozen licensing deals and acquisitions.
Bristol Myers Squibb both invested in K36's Series B and supplied its drug mezigdomide for combination trials with KTX-1001.
K36's lead prostate program runs under the trial name STRIKE-001 - a Phase 1 study of oral NSD2 inhibition.
Terrence (Terry) Connolly is a chemist-turned-dealmaker who runs K36 Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech chasing a single target: NSD2/MMSET, an epigenetic switch that drives hard-to-treat cancers. A Ph.D. organic chemist who started at the lab bench making molecules at Roche, Wyeth and Celgene, he crossed over into business development at Celgene, closed more than two dozen deals, then ran the business side at Skyhawk and Dragonfly. In 2021 he took the top job at K36, and now steers its lead compounds KTX-1001 (for t(4;14) multiple myeloma) and KTX-2001 (for treatment-resistant prostate cancer) through early clinical trials, backed by a $70 million Series B led by Nextech Invest with Bristol Myers Squibb participating.
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