Category Archives: Drug discovery

By Ivana Magovčević-Liebisch, CEO of Vigil Neuroscience, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC In the last decade, our industry has made great strides in combating cancer by harnessing the body’s own immune system. As it was

By Haojing Rong and Aimee Raleigh, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC This blog post is the second in a series on key diligence concepts and questions. If you missed the intro blog post yesterday, click

By Aimee Raleigh, Principal at Atlas Venture, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC Ever wondered what goes into diligencing a new idea, program, company, or platform? While each diligence is unique and every investor will have

By Jonathan Montagu, CEO of HotSpot Therapeutics, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC Signaling pathways are the intricate networks that govern cell behavior, lying at the crux of cell function. They are used by nature to

By Mike Cloonan, CEO of Sionna Therapeutics In 2016, following robust discovery efforts by Pfizer and others, the NBD1 domain of the CFTR protein was largely considered undruggable. They knew it was a key target – the most common genetic

By Jeb Keiper, CEO of Nimbus Therapeutics, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC Forward Nimbus Therapeutics began 14 years ago.  The premise at the time was that putting computational chemistry in the primary position for new

By Jonathan Montagu, CEO and founder of HotSpot Therapeutics, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC. White Hat Hackers, sometimes called “ethical hackers,” are individuals that work to find and fix security problems in a system by

By Jonathan Montagu, CEO of HotSpot Therapeutics, and Ramy Farid, CEO of Schrodinger, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC. No, your next doctor will not be a robot. Nor will an algorithm cure cancer. However, AI

By Jonathan Montagu, CEO and Co-founder of HotSpot Therapeutics, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC Today marks an important point in our journey to patients as HotSpot Therapeutics announces its $100MM Series C financing.  This infusion

Family Oddball, and a New Class of Safe Oral Autoimmune & Inflammatory Disease Treatment with Blockbuster Potential By Jeb Keiper, CEO of Nimbus Therapeutics, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC. On day one of the JPM

The startup paradigm for the creation and funding of new biotech companies has evolved enormously over the past two decades. Recently there’s been a pair of articles from Tech VCs about applying alternative models of company creation (here, here) to

This blog was written by Jeb Keiper, CEO of Nimbus Therapeutics LLC, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC. It is with great excitement that we at Nimbus are ringing in our 10th birthday this month. It’s

This blog was written by Jonathan Montagu, CEO and founder of HotSpot Therapeutics, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC. The predictions around the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) have been broad reaching but it’s clear that

This blog was written by Jonathan Montagu, CEO of Hotspot Therapeutics and Atlas EIR, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC. It starts off with flu-like symptoms and progresses to a perpetual low-grade fever, excessive sweating and

The FDA recently approved Imfinzi (durvalumab) for the treatment of bladder cancer, making it the fifth new monoclonal antibody approved this year. More than twenty antibodies have been approved by the FDA since 2015. While not quite the magic bullet envisioned

Neural networks, cloud computing, deep learning, and in silico wizardry are on the cusp of disintermediating pharmaceutical drug discovery, cutting billions of billions off the industry’s cost of new drugs and reducing the time to get new medicines approved to

A new FDA approval marks a major milestone in the biopharmaceutical business; relatively few biopharma companies are ever able to lay claim to having discovered, developed, or marketed a recently approved medicine. As of mid-October, the FDA has approved 17

This blog was written by Mike Gilman, CEO of Padlock Therapeutics, as part of the “From the Trenches” feature of LifeSciVC. I stumbled into a bit of a mess a few weeks ago. It was with the best of intentions, of course.

This blog was written by Ankit Mahadevia, CEO at Spero Therapeutics, as part of the “From the Trenches” feature of LifeSciVC. In my experience, looking to the outside world for new pipeline ideas isn’t just the realm of larger companies.   The

The exciting renaissance in cell and gene therapy over the past five years has yielded some of the most innovative medical advances in the industry’s pipeline today.  There are now multiple stories of patients getting “cured” of rare diseases, responding

This blog was written by Vanessa King, CEO of Luc Therapeutics (f.k.a. Mnemosyne Pharmaceuticals), as part of the “From the Trenches” feature of LifeSciVC. High winds and cold rain certainly make a first impression – and that was even before I’d

Venture capital investing in biotech has long been hard to disaggregate: how much goes to “early stage” vs “late stage”, how much goes to CNS vs oncology, discovery vs Phase 3, etc… Today BIO’s David Thomas and Chad Wessel have

Every life sciences company needs to make good program choices.  Big pharma creates value through smart portfolio management while small biotech companies can be defined by a single lead asset.  In both cases, the opportunity cost of poor decision-making can

Startup Biotechs need bigger drug companies for lots of things, including R&D collaborations, investments, non-dilutive funding, and eventual liquidity via M&A. The health of today’s ecosystem depends on biotech and pharma working together. But one of the most important and

Extreme clinical phenotypes caused by rare genetic variations have been the basis of some of the most exciting drug targets in today’s pharmaceutical pipeline: PCSK9 in cholesterol, sclerostin in bone diseases, Nav1.7 for pain.  The rare gene signatures underlying these