‘I think I know how to fix this.’
A Harvard Medical School team led by Andrew Kruse has engineered a longer-lasting form of the hormone relaxin—an approach that could help address heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), a hard-to-treat condition affecting roughly 1 million people in the U.S. By converting relaxin from a two-chain to a one-chain molecule and fusing it to an antibody Fc-domain to extend its half-life, the researchers advanced a promising concept toward therapeutic use, with support from Harvard’s Office of Technology Development and the Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator through pilot and development funding and business guidance. That early translational backing helped de-risk the science, enabling Kruse to license the technology and launch Tectonic Therapeutic, where the resulting candidate (TX45) is now in a Phase 2 clinical trial and being explored for pulmonary hypertension linked to heart failure and other serious cardiopulmonary conditions. As Kruse noted, “The Blavatnik Accelerator is really what allowed us to go from a pure research compound to something that was ultimately a clinical candidate.”
