Augustine Therapeutics

Right now, in a lab outside Leuven, a known target is getting a second chance.

HDAC6 has been on the wall of drug-hunters for two decades. It is a cytoplasmic enzyme that sits at the crossroads of how cells move cargo, clear waste, and handle stress. Block it in the right way and damaged nerves start behaving again. Block it the wrong way and you poison everything else in the process. For years, the wrong way was the only way anyone knew.

Augustine Therapeutics is the company betting that the right way finally exists. It is small - around 24 people spread across an HQ in Leuven, a foothold in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a research subsidiary in Copenhagen. It is young, founded in 2019. And as of 2025 it is doing the one thing that separates a biotech story from a biotech company: it is dosing actual patients.

Everyone wanted to drug HDAC6. The chemistry kept getting in the way.

The earlier generation of HDAC6 inhibitors leaned on a chemical group called a hydroxamic acid - a kind of molecular grappling hook. It worked. It also grabbed onto things it shouldn't, which is a polite way of saying it was too toxic to take every day for the rest of your life. For a cancer course measured in weeks, you can live with that. For a chronic disease measured in decades, you cannot.

That is the tension at the center of this company. The diseases that HDAC6 could help - inherited neuropathies, neurodegeneration, cardio-metabolic disorders - are chronic by definition. The tools to drug it were built for acute use. A breakthrough target, locked behind a safety problem.

And the patients were not abstract. Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease - CMT - is one of the most common inherited neurological disorders on earth, affecting roughly 3 million people. It slowly weakens hands, feet, and legs. It is progressive. And in 2025, it still had no approved drug that changes its course. Not a better drug. No drug.

Throw out the grappling hook.

The science traces back to Prof. Ludo Van Den Bosch at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain and Disease Research, who showed that inhibiting HDAC6 could rescue the failing transport machinery inside damaged nerves. Augustine spun out of that work in 2019 to do something specific with it: design HDAC6 inhibitors that skip the toxic hydroxamate warhead entirely.

The result is a proprietary non-hydroxamate, non-hydrazide chemotype. In plain terms, a different chemical handle that grips HDAC6 selectively - shutting down the catalytic activity that drives disease while leaving the enzyme's other, useful jobs intact. Selective enough, the bet goes, to be taken safely for years.

The bet was not subtle. It was: the reason no one has a chronic HDAC6 drug is the chemistry, not the biology - so fix the chemistry. Investors apparently agreed. So, eventually, did Eli Lilly, which rarely shows up to co-invest alongside venture funds at Series A.

One target. Three shots on goal.

Augustine isn't building a single drug. It's building a platform around HDAC6 and pointing it at three very different problems - each with a molecule tuned to where the disease lives in the body.

Three molecules, one enzyme, and a map of the human body drawn by where each drug is allowed to go.

Money is a vote. A patient is a verdict.

In March 2025, Augustine closed an oversubscribed Series A of EUR 77.7 million (USD 84.8 million), co-led by Novo Holdings and Jeito Capital. The round built on a EUR 17.5M first closing led by Asabys Partners, and pulled in AdBio Partners, V-Bio Ventures, PMV, the CMT Research Foundation, Newton Biocapital, the Gemma Frisius Fund, VIB - and Eli Lilly. Total raised to date sits near EUR 89 million.

Funding, drawn to scale

Two rounds, one trajectory. The bar that matters most is the one labeled "first patient" - and it isn't on this chart.

How a lab finding became a clinical trial

Make a famous target safe enough to live with.

Strip away the chemistry jargon and the mission is almost domestic: build drugs people can take for years without the cure becoming its own problem. Augustine's stated aim is selective HDAC6 inhibition that preserves the enzyme's good behavior - delivering disease-modifying therapies across neuromuscular, neurodegenerative and cardio-metabolic disease.

The leadership reflects the bet. CEO Gerhard Koenig brings drug-development mileage. CSO Rie Schultz Hansen anchors the science from Copenhagen. Chief Business Officer Andy Hu works the partnerships. CFO Virginie Cartage minds the runway. Around them, a team that fuses VIB-KU Leuven research depth with people who have moved molecules through the clinic before.