He took the name from the brightest star in the Scorpius constellation. Now Adam Friedman is betting a Boston biotech, and up to $1.9 billion in deals, on drugging the targets everyone else called impossible.
There is a moment every biotech founder dreads and dreams about in equal measure: the day a large pharmaceutical company writes a check big enough to end the story. For Adam Friedman, that day arrived in 2025, when Eli Lilly agreed to pay up to $2.5 billion for Scorpion Therapeutics and its lead cancer program. Most people would have taken the win, thanked the team, and gone quiet for a while.
Friedman did the opposite. Within months he had raised $177 million, kept most of his leadership bench intact, and started a new company aimed squarely at the targets the rest of the industry had written off. He called it Antares Therapeutics, after the brightest star in the constellation Scorpius. If you know that Scorpion was the company he had just sold, the naming reads less like branding and more like a message to his own team: same sky, brighter light.
The throughlineLook across Friedman's career and a pattern emerges that is easy to miss if you only read the press releases. He is not a serial founder chasing whatever is hot. He is a founder circling one stubborn idea from different angles: drug the things that were supposed to be undruggable.
He came to it with a scientist's credentials. A molecular biology degree from Princeton, then an M.D. and a Ph.D. in genetics from Harvard Medical School, followed by clinical training in pediatrics at Boston Children's Hospital. That is a path that leads comfortably to a hospital or a research lab. Friedman took a harder turn, toward the messy, capital-hungry business of inventing medicines that do not yet exist.
His early apprenticeship was at Atlas Venture, where he served as an entrepreneur-in-residence, one of those roles that exists to turn loose science into fundable companies. Out of that period came Raze Therapeutics, a cancer metabolism startup he co-founded and helped build as director of corporate development. Then came Vivid Biosciences, an oncology platform company where he was co-founder, president, and CEO. Each was a rehearsal for a bigger question: could you build not just a drug, but a machine that reliably produces drugs against hard targets?
Friedman joined Scorpion Therapeutics on its founding team and spent his first years there in a role that tells you something about how he thinks: president of corporate strategy and business development. Not the lab. Not the clinic. The part of the company that decides which bets to make and who to make them with. During that stretch he architected the partnerships that would define Scorpion's rise, including deals with AstraZeneca and Pierre Fabre.
In January 2024 the board handed him the whole thing. He became CEO, succeeding Axel Hoos, and inherited a company maturing from a discovery shop into a clinical-stage organization. A year later, the payoff arrived: Lilly's acquisition of Scorpion's mutant-selective PI3K-alpha inhibitor program, STX-478, in a deal valued at up to $2.5 billion. It is the kind of outcome that validates a decade of work.
The interesting part is what did not get sold. Lilly wanted the lead program. Friedman still had a discovery engine, a body of early-stage science, and a team that had learned to work together. Rather than let all of that dissolve into an acquirer's org chart, he spun it out.
The betThe word that follows Antares everywhere is "undruggable." In oncology it describes a specific frustration. The easy targets, the proteins with a nice, deep pocket where a small molecule can lodge, are mostly taken. What remains is the hard stuff: transcription factors, proteins with smooth surfaces and no obvious place to grab, targets that biologists have known matter for years but chemists have never been able to touch.
Friedman looked at that pile of abandoned problems and decided it was not a graveyard. It was the opportunity.
The way Antares proposes to do this is not a single trick but a stacked set of capabilities that Friedman keeps describing as an engine. It has three parts, and they are meant to compound.
Proprietary compound libraries, next-generation mass spectrometry, and pocket-finding methods aimed at molecules once considered untouchable.
First-in-class, preclinically validated targets, plus allosteric approaches to clinically validated ones, guided by human genetics.
Physics-based modeling, molecular dynamics, and machine learning built to shorten the discovery cycle rather than replace the chemists.
It is a deliberately unglamorous pitch. There is no promise of one miracle molecule. There is a promise of a repeatable process, which is a far harder thing to build and a far more valuable thing to own. A molecule is an outcome. An engine is a habit.
The team dividendWhen Scorpion was acquired, Friedman faced a choice most founders never articulate out loud: who comes with you. The answer, in his case, was most of the senior leadership. Chief scientific officer Erica Jackson, chief medical officer Mark Chao, head of chemistry Angel Guzman-Perez, and others made the jump from Scorpion to Antares alongside him.
That continuity is not a footnote. In biotech, the scarcest resource is rarely money. It is a team that has already learned how to fail together and keep going. Friedman did not have to rebuild that from scratch, which is its own quiet form of leverage. Reputation, it turns out, recruits better than any job posting.
A startup can claim it has a discovery engine. It is another thing entirely when one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world pays to plug into it. In June 2026, barely a year after launch, Antares signed a collaboration with Novartis to discover, develop, and commercialize small-molecule therapies against historically undruggable oncology targets. The terms: $105 million upfront and up to $1.8 billion in additional milestones, with tiered royalties reaching the low double digits.
Headline deal values across Friedman's recent chapters. Bars scaled to the Lilly transaction.
Read Friedman's language carefully and you notice he almost never talks about a single drug. He talks about scaling an engine, about speed, about doing together what neither party could do alone. It is the vocabulary of someone who has decided the platform, not the pill, is the product.
The nameIt would be easy to skip past the naming, but Friedman has been explicit about it, and it says something about how he leads. Antares is the brightest star in Scorpius, the same constellation that gave Scorpion Therapeutics its name. Choosing it was a way of telling a team that had just watched their company get absorbed that the mission had not ended. It had graduated.
Antares the star is a red supergiant, hundreds of times the diameter of our Sun, the kind of object that is impossible to ignore once you know where to look. For a company whose entire thesis is making the invisible targetable, it is a fitting emblem. The hard part was never seeing the star. The hard part is reaching it.
The strategy Friedman has chosen carries real risk, and he does not pretend otherwise. Going after only novel, first-in-class targets means there is no competitor's drug to copy and improve, no worn path to follow. If a target has never been drugged, no one can tell you in advance that it can be. Every program is a wager that the biology is real and the chemistry is possible.
But that is also where the value lives. The first small molecule against a validated but untouched target does not have to be the best drug in a category. For a while, it is the only one. Antares expects its lead precision oncology program to enter the clinic in 2026, with a stack of preclinical programs behind it. That first clinical candidate will be the earliest real test of whether the engine does what Friedman keeps promising it does.
What makes him worth watching is not the size of the deals, impressive as they are. It is the consistency of the bet. Raze, Vivid, Scorpion, Antares. Different names, different investors, different molecules, and underneath all of it the same conviction that the targets everyone else abandoned are exactly the ones worth building a company around. He has been circling that idea for more than a decade. With Antares, he has the most resources he has ever had to chase it down.