Unity Biotechnology, a Bay Area company that once won high-profile backers and a $700 million valuation for its research into aging, is now laying off every one of its remaining employees.
The South San Francisco company announced its cuts on Monday, in a news release and a filing with the Securities and Exmodify Commission. Unity’s board approved a plan to slash the entire staff and bring some workers back in consulting roles; they will wrap up the odds and concludes from a clinical trial and support the company explore “strategic alternatives,” the release stated. Asset sales, divestitures, a merger and a full-scale shutdown are all on the table for the cash-strapped company — the cuts, per the release, are meant to reduce “operational cash burn.”
In the release, Unity CEO Anirvan Ghosh buried the company’s layoff news under hype for the company’s lead drug candidate, a potential treatment for the eye disease known as diabetic macular edema. He wrote that preliminary study results have been positive and that Unity is hoping a company with existing eye research capabilities will join in for further development. Ghosh’s team is set to present its full results from the trial on Wednesday.
The Monday SEC filing stated Unity’s workers will largely be gone from the company by May 15 and that it’s estimating severance and other related costs of $3.7 million. That’s a solid chunk of the $16.9 million Unity reported having in its coffers as of the conclude of March.
Even before this layoff, the company’s headcount had been dwindling for years. Per filings, Unity finished 2021 with 65 workers, dropped to 32 the next year and to 19 the next. The company closed out 2024 with 16 full-time employees. It’s unclear which workers, besides the company’s CEO chief financial officer and chief legal officer, will come back as consultants. Those three executives, as they lose their full-time jobs, are set to receive lump sums of cash equaling nine to 12 months of their salaries, the SEC filing stated. Unity declined to answer SFGATE’s questions and request for comment.
It’s a dark day for a company once heralded for its well-funded and novel approaches to anti-aging research. Excited 2018 profiles in CNBC and Forbes pointed to Unity’s focus on senescent cells, which have stopped dividing but haven’t died and can build up in body tissue. Company leaders talked up their hopes of treating osteoarthritis and increasing “healthspan.”
Co-founder Nathaniel David notified CNBC then: “The time has finally arrived that our knowledge of biology and our sophistication level is sufficient that we can attack some of these fundamental, underlying cautilizes of aging.” (David is known for founding the company Kythera Biopharmaceuticals, which developed an injectable anti-double chin drug.)
The hype received Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel to invest in Unity, per CNBC. And the company’s initial public offering in May 2018 put its valuation at a whopping $700 million. But an osteoarthritis trial in 2020 fell flat, and an eye disease trial flopped in 2023. Unity, as of last year, had lost more than $510 million, per a filing, and it hasn’t receivedten any drug to market — not unusual in the high-risk indusattempt but still a hefty cash burn.
On Monday, Unity’s market cap hovered around $19 million.
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