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The doctor in the C-suite
Most biotech CEOs put the white coat in a drawer years before they ever sign a lease. Andrew Dervan kept his. While he co-runs Cajal Neuroscience, he still sees patients as a practicing clinical geneticist at the University of Washington Medical Center, sitting across from people with adult-onset neurological conditions and reading the same genetic test results his company is trying to act on. The disease on the page and the disease in the pipeline are the same disease. That is not a biographical footnote. It is the thesis.
Cajal Neuroscience - also known as Cajal Therapeutics - emerged from stealth on November 29, 2022, with a $96 million Series A led by The Column Group and Lux Capital. The pitch was specific: neurodegeneration has been one of the hardest places in medicine to find drugs that work, and a big reason is that the field leaned on models that did not reflect human biology. Cajal's answer was to start from human genetics and functional genomics, then layer in high-resolution microscopy to watch disease mechanisms with spatial and temporal resolution. Find the right target first; spare patients the heartbreak of another failed trial later.
Dervan came to that mission with a dealmaker's resume and a clinician's instincts. Before Cajal he was Senior Director of Business Development at Celgene, where he led the company's cell therapy partnerships and immuno-oncology transactions - the kind of high-stakes negotiations that decide which science gets funded and which quietly dies. He also led a Translational Medicine team there, applying single-cell sequencing to oncology target discovery. When Bristol Myers Squibb absorbed Celgene, he carried that cell-therapy work forward. The through-line: he had already spent years figuring out how to turn raw biological insight into programs, money, and momentum.
He swapped oncology dealmaking for the brain - and brought the single-cell playbook with him.
// On the pivot from cancer to neurodegeneration
A name that is a manifesto
The company is named for Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the Spanish scientist who hand-drew neurons under a microscope in the late nineteenth century and, in doing so, founded modern neuroscience. He won the Nobel Prize in 1906. Choosing his name is a tell about how the founders think: that the way to understand the brain's diseases is to look closely, structure by structure, exactly as Cajal did - only now with genomics and modern imaging instead of ink and a microscope. It is an unusually literary choice for a venture-backed startup, and an honest one.
The founding team reads like a deliberate assembly of complementary strengths. Alongside Dervan stand co-founder and fellow Co-CEO Ian Peikon, PhD; executive chairman and co-founder Rob Hershberg, MD, PhD; and a scientific brain trust of Huda Zoghbi, Anthony Zador, and Charles Zuker - names that carry real weight in genetics and neuroscience. The board pairs investors Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital and Tim Kutzkey of The Column Group with operators from across the industry.
The co-CEO experiment
Sharing the top job is rare in biotech, where boards usually want one throat to choke. Dervan and Peikon split it anyway - one leaning toward the science and platform, the other toward strategy, operations, and the deals that keep a young company alive. It is a structure that only works when two people trust each other's judgment more than they guard their own turf. For a company built on the premise that no single lens explains a disease, running it through two complementary leaders is a fitting bit of symmetry.
Built on a stack of credentials, grounded by a clinic
Dervan's training is the kind that usually pulls people toward pure research or pure finance. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University, then a Doctor of Medicine from Harvard Medical School and a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School. He completed a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in medical genetics at the University of Washington. Earlier in his path he passed through Massachusetts General Hospital and the venture firm 5AM Ventures - a tour through medicine, the lab, and the money that connects them.
What is striking is what he did with all of it. The expected move is to specialize: become the doctor, or the investor, or the executive. Dervan kept being all three at once. The clinic keeps the science honest. The MBA keeps the science funded. The MD keeps both pointed at patients. Few founders can sit fluently in the exam room and the cap table on the same day; he is one of them.
Building the bench beyond his own company
Dervan also serves on the leadership of Life Science Washington, the industry organization that knits together the region's biotech ecosystem. It is the unglamorous civic work of an industry - mentoring, policy, talent, the connective tissue that turns a cluster of companies into a real hub. That he spends time on it says something about how he thinks: a single company is a bet, but an ecosystem is what makes the next ten bets possible.
Cajal is still early. Neurodegeneration remains brutally hard, and a $96 million launch is a beginning, not a victory lap. But the wager is clear and it is unusually well-formed: start from human biology, look closely the way the company's namesake did, and let a physician who still sees the patients help steer where the science goes. If the field's old failures came from looking in the wrong place, Cajal's founders decided the fix was to look harder, and closer, at the right one.
