A biotech that thinks the fastest route to the immune system runs through the brain - and just raised $101 million to prove it.
The Nilo wordmark, photographed where most biotech ambition begins: a logo, a lab lease, and a very large bank wire.
In a freshly leased building in New York City, a team of roughly 35 people is doing something the rest of immunology has mostly ignored. They are not hunting for another molecule to switch the immune system off. They are studying a nerve - the vagus nerve - and the circuits it runs between the brain and the body, and asking whether those circuits can be turned into drugs.
That is Nilo Therapeutics. The company stepped out of stealth in October 2025 with $101 million, a roster of scientific founders most universities would frame on a wall, and a thesis that sounds, at first, like science fiction: the brain already knows how to regulate inflammation. The trick is learning to speak its language.
For decades, the standard move against autoimmune and inflammatory disease has been blunt: turn the immune system down. Steroids, biologics, broad immunosuppressants. They work, often well. They also leave the door open - to infection, to resistance, to the slow accumulation of trade-offs that patients learn to live with because the alternative is worse.
The deeper issue is that the immune system is not a single dial. It is a tangle of pathways, and hitting one usually means the others compensate. Suppress here, flare there. Nilo's founders looked at that picture and asked a different question - not "which immune cell do we block?" but "what is supposed to be coordinating all of them in the first place?"
The answer, it turns out, may not live in the immune system at all. It may live upstream, in the nervous system.
The science traces back to the laboratory of Charles Zuker at Columbia University - an HHMI investigator better known for decades of work on the senses - whose team identified specific neurons of the vagus nerve that regulate systemic immune activation and inflammation. Not metaphorically. Specific, mappable neurons that act as master regulators.
Zuker did not build the company alone. He was joined as a scientific founder by Ruslan Medzhitov of Yale - one of the most cited names in innate immunity - and Steve Liberles of Harvard, a sensory-neuroscience heavyweight. Three labs, three disciplines, one shared suspicion: that the brain-immune axis is a drug target hiding in plain sight. The company was co-created with venture firm The Column Group to turn that suspicion into programs.
His lab identified the vagal neurons that regulate systemic inflammation - the discovery Nilo is built on.
A foundational figure in innate immunity, bringing the immune half of the brain-immune equation.
Sensory and vagal neuroscience expertise, mapping how the body talks to the brain.
To run the company, the founders recruited Kim Seth, Ph.D., who had been chief business officer at the precision-oncology biotech Repare Therapeutics, and paired her with chief scientific officer Laurens Kruidenier, Ph.D., a veteran of Cellarity and Prometheus Biosciences (the latter acquired by Merck). Academic founders supply the insight; the operators are there to make it survive contact with drug development.
Charles Zuker's lab at Columbia identifies specific vagal neurons that regulate systemic immune activation and inflammation - the seed of everything that follows.
Founders Zuker, Medzhitov, and Liberles partner with TCG to translate neuro-immunology insights into a therapeutics platform.
Nilo emerges from stealth. Lux Capital, DCVC Bio, and The Column Group lead, with the Gates Foundation and Alexandria Venture Investments participating. Kim Seth named CEO.
Capital goes toward building New York laboratories, growing an interdisciplinary R&D team, and advancing preclinical drug candidates.
Nilo's platform is built around what the company calls master-regulator brain-body circuits. The pitch is mechanistic, not magical: because these circuits sit upstream of many immune pathways at once, a drug that acts on them could modulate several pathways in concert. The claimed payoff is twofold - a lower risk of the therapeutic resistance that dogs single-target drugs, and a broader potential reach across diseases.
What Nilo has not done is overpromise on specifics. The company has not named its lead indication, and it remains firmly preclinical - no trials, no patients, yet. In a sector fond of announcing cures before mice are convinced, that restraint is either discipline or simply the honest math of early biotech. Probably both.
A thesis this early lives or dies on who believes it. Nilo's $101M Series A came from investors who do not, as a rule, write checks for cocktail-napkin ideas - and one foundation better known for global health than venture biotech.
Bars scaled for emphasis, not to a shared axis. The honest headline: a lot of money, a small team, and a pipeline still in the lab.
Helped build Nilo from the founders' science up.
Deep-tech and computational biology backer.
Known for funding hard, frontier science.
A signal of interest beyond classic venture biotech.
Life-science real estate's investment arm.
Stated plainly, Nilo's mission is to harness neural circuits to restore immune homeostasis in disease - to build a generation of therapies that work through the brain-immune axis instead of around it. The company frames the target as autoimmune and inflammatory conditions broadly, the kind with large unmet need and millions of patients who have learned to manage rather than recover.
It is a mission that depends on a hard idea being right. If the brain really does hold master controls over inflammation, and if those controls can be reached with a drug, the implications run wide. If not, $101 million buys a great deal of careful, expensive learning. Nilo is honest enough not to pretend it already knows which.
Return to that building in New York. A few months ago it held a lease and an idea. Now it holds equipment being uncrated, scientists being hired, and preclinical programs taking their first real shape. The vagus nerve is still just a nerve. But for the first time, a well-funded company is treating it as a control panel and trying to write the software.
If Nilo is right, the autoimmune patient of the next decade might not face the familiar bargain - relief in exchange for a weakened defense. They might instead get a drug that nudges the body back toward balance and then steps out of the way. That is the bet. It is unproven, preclinical, and entirely possible to lose.
What's no longer in doubt is that serious people with serious money have decided the question is worth asking. The team that walked into an empty Manhattan lab walked out with a thesis, a checkbook, and a deadline. Now they have to make the nerve answer.
Note: Nilo Therapeutics had not published official YouTube interviews or product-demo videos at the time of writing - the company launched in October 2025 and remains preclinical. Figures are drawn from public announcements and may be approximate.