Ep207: Jason Coloma on Genetic Medicines for Kidney Diseases

What It Covers

Jason Coloma, CEO of Maze Therapeutics, traces the company's path from a $190M Third Rock-backed startup to a newly public biotech with two phase two kidney disease programs — APOL1-directed therapy and SLC6A19 — built on human genetics datasets including UK Biobank and FinnGen to identify novel small molecule drug targets.

Key Questions Answered

• •Genetics-first target selection: Maze identifies drug targets by mining large population genetics databases — UK Biobank, FinnGen — to find gene variants that either cause disease or protect against it. The APOL1 program emerged from discovering that some individuals carrying two disease-risk copies of the variant never developed kidney disease, pointing to a protective secondary variant that a small molecule could phenocopy therapeutically.
• •Modality focus reduces compounded risk: When taking on novel biology targets with uncertain mechanisms, pair them with proven drug modalities rather than novel ones. Maze deliberately narrowed from multiple modalities — antisense, small molecules — to oral small molecules exclusively, reasoning that stacking biological uncertainty on top of chemistry uncertainty creates an unfavorable risk profile for a capital-constrained company.
• •Regulatory pathway clarity attracts capital: Kidney disease attracted little pharma investment for a decade partly because outcome-based trials required large patient numbers over long timescales. The FDA's cardiorenal division, working with academic consortia like the PARASOL group at Michigan, has opened biomarker-based endpoints — including urine protein reduction — that compress development timelines and make the area fundable for smaller biotechs.
• •Partnership contingency planning: When the FTC blocked Maze's Sanofi partnership for the Pompe disease program on antitrust grounds, the business development team had already been cultivating a backup relationship with Shionogi. The replacement deal closed within roughly six months and on better financial terms than the original, demonstrating that parallel relationship-building with multiple potential partners before a deal closes is a concrete risk mitigation strategy.
• •Disease area focus compounds expertise: Rather than spreading across multiple therapeutic areas as originally scoped under the founding CEO, Coloma narrowed Maze entirely to kidney disease. This concentration allowed the team to build deep nephrologist relationships, track regulatory evolution at ASN conferences, and develop internal chemistry expertise around renal biology — advantages that became visible when the IPO environment tightened and investors demanded clearer differentiation.
• •Board composition for commercialization readiness: As Maze moves toward potential pivotal trials, Coloma recruited board members — including the CEO of Incyte and BridgeBio's Neil Kumar — specifically because they have direct experience taking drugs from development through commercial launch. For biotech CEOs targeting an independent commercial model, identifying board members who have navigated that specific transition, rather than only drug discovery or finance experts, fills a concrete operational knowledge gap.