She used to write the checks for biotech founders. Then she decided the better seat was on the other side of the table.
In a New York office that holds about fourteen people, Damaris Skouras is running a thesis most pharmaceutical giants would call reckless: that one oral pill can quiet the same inflammatory alarm in a gout-swollen toe, a growing melanoma, a diabetic pancreas, and the early-stage Parkinson’s brain.
The pill is dapansutrile. The alarm is the NLRP3 inflammasome, a molecular switch that fires when the immune system senses danger and, when stuck on, helps drive disease after disease. Most drug companies build a new compound for each indication. Skouras has spent years doing the opposite - taking the same specific inhibitor and knocking on a different clinical door with it, watching to see which ones open.
Olatec is clinical-stage, privately held, and lean by design. It does not have the headcount of a marquee biotech or the marketing of one. What it has is a focused bet and a founder who knows exactly how the money behind biotech works, because she spent the first half of her career supplying it.
That lean shape is a tell. A fourteen-person company carrying a drug through Phase 2 in multiple indications is not the product of a founder learning fundraising on the job. It is the product of someone who has watched, from the financier’s chair, exactly how capital gets wasted - the bloated org charts, the indications chased for the wrong reasons, the burn that outruns the data. Skouras has built the opposite: a tight team and a single asset she keeps re-aiming rather than abandoning.
In 1982, fresh out of Harvard Business School, she joined Allen & Company as a vice president and was handed a job that taught her the entire arc of a startup: take biotech and technology companies from early inception all the way through exit.
That is an unusual education. Most people in biotech learn one slice - the science, the trials, the regulatory grind, the fundraising. Skouras learned the part that decides whether any of the rest happens: who gets funded, on what terms, and how a company is built to be worth something at the end. By 1985 she had founded her own firm, Global Reach Management Company, an international advisory shop with a deliberate niche in biotechnology investing.
For decades she was the person founders pitched. Then she stopped pitching and started building. Global Reach would go on to provide investment banking services to the very company she now runs. The banker had become the client, and then the boss.
She spent her career learning who gets funded and why. Then she funded herself.
There is a quiet advantage in that biography. Most scientist-founders learn the money the hard way, diluting themselves through rounds they barely understand. Skouras arrived at the founder’s chair already fluent in term sheets, exits, and the patience biotech demands. Her early roles at Olatec were not ceremonial: before taking the top job she served as co-President and chief financial officer, then as President - the person responsible for keeping the lights on long enough for the science to mature. She moved into the chairman and CEO seat in 2013 and has held both ever since.
Thirty-plus years in and around drug development is a long time to keep believing in anything. Biotech is a graveyard of promising mechanisms that worked in a dish and failed in a body. What kept her in the field is also what shapes Olatec: a conviction that inflammation is not background noise but a lever, and that the right molecule pulling that lever could matter in places no one originally drew it.
The pitch is almost stubbornly simple. Inflammation is not just a symptom riding along with disease - in many cases it is part of the engine. Olatec’s wager is that turning down one specific inflammatory switch, cleanly enough to take it for a long time, could help across conditions that otherwise look nothing alike.
One key, many locks - indications explored:
Why does this matter as a business and not just a science fair? Because each new indication is, in effect, a new lottery ticket bought with the same molecule. The expensive part of drug development - discovering a compound, proving it is safe enough to take, understanding how it behaves in the body - is largely shared. If dapansutrile has a clean enough safety record to be taken for long stretches, then pointing it at Parkinson’s after gout is not starting over. It is reusing years of work and asking a fresh question.
The catch, of course, is that biology rarely cooperates so neatly. A switch that matters enormously in one disease may turn out to be a bystander in another. Olatec’s strategy lives or dies on which of those clinical doors actually open. The melanoma mouse data in 2021 and the disease-modifying signals in Parkinson’s models are the early reads that keep the thesis alive - promising enough to fund the next trial, far from the finish line of an approved therapy.
In February 2023, Olatec closed a $40 million Series A led by Sanders Morris Harris - the kind of round a founder who understands financing tends to structure on her own terms. It pushed total money raised past the hundred-million mark.
Bars scaled for illustration. Figures from public funding disclosures.
“Dapansutrile holds considerable potential as an oral therapy capable of modulating a shared core inflammatory mechanism that could deliver disease-modifying effects across a range of pathologies.”
The first patients were randomized in DAPA-PD, a 12-month Phase 2 study at Cambridge University Hospitals - Olatec’s first push of dapansutrile into neurological disease, backed by Cure Parkinson’s and the Van Andel Institute.
Preclinical work pointed to dapansutrile altering core neurodegenerative processes in Parkinson’s models - the kind of result that turns a single-indication drug into a platform argument.
Beyond neurology, the molecule continues to be studied across inflammation-driven conditions including gout, cancer models, and metabolic disease - the many-locks, one-key strategy in practice.
The Parkinson’s move is the most telling chapter so far. Neurodegeneration is one of the hardest arenas in all of medicine, a field littered with failed trials and humbled companies. Pushing an oral inflammation drug into early Parkinson’s, with a respected academic center and disease-focused foundations behind it, is the kind of swing that only makes sense if you genuinely believe the underlying mechanism is shared. It is also the clearest expression of how Skouras thinks: take the asset you already trust and aim it at the biggest problem it might plausibly touch.
Strip away the science and the financing and what is left is a single, unfashionable virtue: patience. The biotech industry rewards loud milestones and punishes the long middle, the years between a promising mouse and a useful pill. Skouras has spent four decades in that middle - first underwriting other people’s versions of it, now living her own. The bet she has placed is not on a breakthrough moment but on a mechanism worth waiting out, and on a small team disciplined enough to keep asking it new questions until one of them pays.
Profile compiled from public sources: Olatec, The Org, Crunchbase, BusinessWire, PR Newswire. Facts verified where possible; uncertain details omitted.