Re-envisioning inhalation medicine - one normal breath at a time. The startup that decided the hardest organ to medicate deserved a better device.
On the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute campus in Albuquerque, about seven people are building a device that looks almost too simple for the problem it tackles. It is called DryNeb. It is, by the company's account, the world's first dry powder nebulizer. And it exists to solve a question medicine has quietly tolerated for decades: why is it so hard to get enough medicine into the lung?
Nob Hill Therapeutics is not a household name. It has no consumer app, no glossy launch event, no billion-dollar valuation to brag about. What it has is a patent, a $3 million Series A, a deep bench of respiratory advisors, and a stubborn conviction that the lung deserves better than the tools we hand it.
Caption: A biotech named after a Route 66 neighborhood, betting on the unglamorous physics of getting powder to go where breath usually won't.
Here is the awkward truth about inhaled medicine. The two dominant tools each ask the patient for something. Dry powder inhalers demand a strong, fast, well-timed breath - the exact thing a sick lung struggles to produce. Liquid nebulizers are gentler but slow, bulky, and tend to deliver modest doses over long, tedious sessions. Neither was really built for the patient who needs the most help.
So the patients who could benefit most from inhaled therapy - the elderly, the very young, anyone with compromised lung function - are often the ones the existing devices serve worst. The result is a strange gap. Lower respiratory tract infections rank as the fifth leading cause of death worldwide, and yet many promising drugs never reach the lung in a dose that matters.
Caption: Two devices, two compromises. Nob Hill's whole pitch is that you shouldn't have to pick a compromise.
Nob Hill Therapeutics was spun out of VIC Technology Venture Development, the venture builder that founded the company and still backs it. The bet was specific: combine the high-dose punch of a dry powder formulation with the gentle, effortless delivery of a nebulizer, and remove the patient's lungs from the equation entirely. No forceful inhale. No breath-hold. No coordination drills. You breathe normally; the device handles the rest.
Leadership grew around that bet. Noel Greenberger came on as CEO. Paul Atkins, a seasoned life-science executive, joined as Executive Chairman. Technical depth arrived with Dr. Davies-Cutting in 2022. By 2025 the company had stacked a strategic advisory board with leaders in respiratory drug development and pulmonary medicine - a lot of firepower for a company you can count on two hands.
Caption: A board heavier than the payroll - which is exactly what an early biotech wants on its side.
DryNeb is the company's patented inhalation drug delivery platform. The idea is to fuse two things that usually live apart - the concentrated, high-dose potential of dry powder, and the calm, passive delivery of a nebulizer. The device is designed to push reproducible, high doses of medicine deep into the lung while the patient simply breathes, with no special inhalation maneuver required.
That last detail is the whole point. Because the device does the work, it is built to function across the full range of patients - all ages, all lung capacities, including lungs that are already compromised. A drug that "can't be inhaled effectively" with conventional tools becomes, in theory, a drug you can.
Pair a therapeutic with DryNeb and you get a way to deliver a meaningful dose directly to diseased lung tissue - the target site - instead of routing it through the whole body. For pharma and biotech partners, that opens inhaled paths for drugs that were previously stuck as injections or pills. For patients, it means treatment that doesn't depend on how strong your next breath is.
Caption: The unsexy miracle of medical devices - making the medicine boring to take, so it actually gets taken.
A pre-IND biotech can't point to revenue charts, so it points to conviction. Nob Hill's came in August 2024: a $3 million Series A first close, led by Tramway Venture Partners, joined by TCA Venture Group and founding investor VIC. The capital is earmarked for continued development and pre-IND studies - the unglamorous, expensive work that turns a clever device into an approvable one.
Then there are the grants. Multiple HHS Phase II awards - including one in 2023 aimed at a lung cancer therapy - signal that federal reviewers, not just venture investors, think the platform is worth funding. Non-dilutive money like this does double duty for an early biotech: it funds the science without selling off the company, and it acts as a public vote of confidence from people whose job is to be skeptical. And the company's address is its own kind of evidence: facilities on the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute campus, one of the country's dedicated homes for inhalation science.
The investor roster tells a similar story. Tramway Venture Partners led; TCA Venture Group came along; VIC, the venture builder that founded the company, kept its skin in the game. When financing closed, Tramway's Chris Japp took a board seat and TCA's Sima Ghafari joined as a board observer - the kind of governance that arrives with capital and tends to accelerate a young company's discipline.
Caption: A startup whose neighbors are entire buildings devoted to how things get into lungs. Hard to pick a better address.
The company's stated mission is to change the treatment paradigm for lung-related diseases through high-dose lung delivery. That phrasing matters. It's not "build a better inhaler." It's a claim that whole categories of disease - lower respiratory infections, lung fungal infections, lung cancer - could be approached differently if the delivery problem were solved first.
It's a long road. Pre-IND means the hardest regulatory miles are still ahead, and a seven-person team competing in a field with established names like Vectura, Aerogen and the big respiratory incumbents is, by any honest measure, the underdog. But underdogs with a patent, federal grants and a focused thesis are exactly the kind that occasionally rearrange a field.
Caption: The most ambitious thing here isn't the device. It's the verb "change."
Return to where we started: seven people on a respiratory research campus, a device that looks too simple for the size of the problem. Except now the picture is different. The simplicity is the achievement. If DryNeb does what the patents and the early funding suggest, the patients who were served worst - the frail, the very young, the lungs that can't perform on command - become the patients served best.
That's the quiet inversion Nob Hill is chasing. Not a flashier inhaler, but a world where "we can't get the drug into the lung" stops being a reason a treatment fails. The number on the wall - fifth leading cause of death - is the scoreboard. The device is the move.
Whether they pull it off is still an open question. The most interesting companies usually are.