As the story goes, the Cambridge-based epigenetic therapeutics company Epizyme was born on a summer California day in 2007, during an annual scientific retreat held by MPM Capital, a life science venture fund.
Each year, the bicoastal investment company hand picks a group of academic scientists to present their work around a chosen theme. That year’s theme was “new modalities for cancer,” and one of the speakers was Yi Zhang, a biochemist and biophysicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was studying a number of enzymes that modify histones—the protein spools around which DNA winds—and the dysregulation of these enzymes in cancer.
Zhang told the room that it was the start of a new era in drug discovery, and that epigenetic therapies—which target not genes themselves, but enzymes regulating how and when those genes are ...
