Dozens of startups have called FastForward’s innovation hub in the 1812 Ashland building home since it opened five years ago. Now, one of the original tenants will be moving out for a good reason.
Avidea Technologies, which develops T cell immunotherapies to treat cancer and autoimmune diseases, was acquired by Vaccitech, a British drug and vaccine maker, in December 2021 for $40 million. The deal was the culmination of a lifetime of research and more recent entrepreneurial efforts by Geoffrey Lynn, Avidea’s co-founder and CEO, who attended the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
“Avidea was really the vehicle for our team to advance promising therapies to patients,” he says. “From our earliest days, we always kept an open mind about how to achieve this and how we would eventually exit the company.”