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Atlas Molecular Pharma S.L., Derio (Bizkaia), private prion research company logo

Atlas Molecular Pharma S.L., Derio (Bizkaia), private prion research company

Atlas Molecular Pharma is a small private drug discovery company in the Bizkaia Technology Park at Derio, founded in September 2015 as a spin-off of the CIC bioGUNE research centre. Its main business is pharmacological chaperones, small molecules that stabilise faulty enzymes in rare metabolic diseases; its lead, ATL-001 for congenital erythropoietic porphyria, received a favourable FDA response to its IND in September 2022. Prion disease is a smaller line: its pipeline lists ATL-003 for prion diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease at the hit identification stage, with no target named. The company shares people with the CIC bioGUNE prion laboratory, whose leader is listed as its CTO, and Atlas-affiliated researchers co-author much of that lab's prion output, including recombinant prion methods, a prion decontamination test, strain typing and genetic prion disease studies. It was a partner in the Interreg REDPRION network and is a partner in its successor NEURO-COOP. Information only, not medical advice.

Key facts

  • Atlas Molecular Pharma was founded in September 2015 in Bizkaia as a CIC bioGUNE spin-off and is based at Edificio 800 of the Bizkaia Technology Park in Derio.
  • Its stated model is to discover first-in-class drugs for rare and ultra-rare diseases with an in-house pharmacological chaperone platform and license them to larger companies.
  • A 2016 trade report said it was set up jointly by CIC bioGUNE, the venture firm CRB Inverbio, the investment group Kereon Partners and private investors, and that its technology might also be applied to prion diseases including CJD, with the CIC bioGUNE prion laboratory among the collaborating groups.
  • In February 2022 it closed a 3 million euro round led by Inveready, with the public body CDTI, the Basque EZTEN venture fund and existing shareholders, to take its porphyria drug into the clinic.
  • Its lead candidate ATL-001, an oral stabiliser of the UROIIIS enzyme for congenital erythropoietic porphyria, had a favourable FDA response to its IND in September 2022, opening a phase I study in healthy volunteers.
  • Its pipeline lists ATL-003 for prion diseases such as CJD at the hit identification stage of discovery; neither the company nor the AseBio directory names a target or mechanism.
  • Its team page lists the CIC bioGUNE prion laboratory leader Joaquin Castilla as CTO, a project manager who joined in 2017 to build the prion pipeline, and a staff scientist running most prion animal model studies.
  • A Europe PMC affiliation search finds 49 papers from 2018 to 2026 with an Atlas Molecular Pharma affiliation, about 29 of them on prions, alongside porphyria, tyrosinemia and NMR metabolomics work.
  • Atlas-affiliated authors developed a scalable shaking-based method to make infectious recombinant prions for structural studies (2019) and the Protein Misfolding Shaking Amplification method that generated bona fide prions from more than 380 mammalian prion proteins (2024).
  • A 2020 paper with four Atlas-affiliated authors described a bead-based method that recovers infectious recombinant prions from contaminated material to compare decontamination procedures.
  • An Atlas-affiliated researcher co-authored the 2025 Toulouse-led study showing that E200K genetic CJD carries the same two main strains as sporadic CJD with low peripheral infectivity, funded by NEURO-COOP and REDPRION, and the 2026 paper on the kuru-protective G127V prion protein as a dominant-negative therapy.
  • Atlas was a REDPRION partner with a 70,000 euro budget, the only private company in that network, and is a partner in NEURO-COOP under Interreg VI-A POCTEFA 2021-2027.

Timeline

  1. 2015Company founded in Bizkaia as a CIC bioGUNE spin-off.
  2. 2016Trade press reports the launch and its backers, noting possible use in prion diseases.
  3. 2017Project manager joins to develop the prion disease pipeline.
  4. 2018REDPRION, with Atlas as partner, starts under Interreg V-A POCTEFA.
  5. 2019Scalable recombinant prion propagation method published with Atlas-affiliated authors.
  6. 2020Prion decontamination evaluation method published with four Atlas-affiliated authors.
  7. 20223 million euro funding round led by Inveready announced.
  8. 2022Favourable FDA response to the ATL-001 IND.
  9. 2024NEURO-COOP actions start, with Atlas as partner.
  10. 2024PMSA recombinant prion method published in Nature Communications.
  11. 2025E200K genetic CJD strain paper published with an Atlas-affiliated coauthor.
  12. 2026G127V dominant-negative paper published online in Neurobiology of Disease.
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