Millennium Founder Heads a New Biotech

If, in the wake of the sale of Millennium, you’ve been wondering what ever happened to the company’s co-founder and longtime CEO Mark Levin, the answer was in this morning’s deal news, in the announcement that a young biotech called Constellation Pharmaceuticals had closed a $32 million Series A financing. The companies coming up with the funding: The Column Group, Venrock, and Third Rock Ventures—a company whose partner list reads like a Who’s Who of former Millennium folks—including Mark Levin.

Levin will be interim CEO of Constellation, which will focus its research on epigenetics, chemical processes that affect the way genes are expressed. The company was founded by Danny Reinberg, Ph.D, Professor of Biochemistry at the New York University School of Medicine and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Institute; Yang Shi, Ph.D., Professor of Pathology at the Harvard Medical School; and David Allis, Ph.D., Professor and head of the Laboratory of Chromatin Biology at The Rockefeller University.

Want to read more? Here’s an article from the Boston Globe on the new company, an analysis of which pharma companies are doing what in epigenetics, and a 2003 profile of Mark Levin from the pages of Pharm Exec.