Profile / Biotech / The Builder
Rick Batycky
He doesn't make the drug louder. He makes the nerve quieter.
Twenty years, one obsession: getting a drug to land exactly where it needs to go.
He doesn't make the drug louder. He makes the nerve quieter.
Somewhere in Watertown, Massachusetts, there is a man who has spent more than twenty years thinking about the inside of a lung. Rick Batycky is President and CEO of Nocion Therapeutics, and his job right now is to turn off a cough that refuses to quit.
Not suppress it the old way - by sedating the whole nervous system and hoping the side effects stay polite. Nocion's idea is narrower and stranger: a new class of charged sodium channel blockers that slip only into the sensory neurons that are already misbehaving, and leave everything else untouched. The nerves that scream get silenced. The ones doing their jobs never notice.
That precision is the through-line of everything Batycky has built. He is a chemical engineer by training - University of Calgary for the bachelor's, then MIT for both a master's and a doctorate in the same subject. Most people study how to get a reaction to happen. He studied how to get a particle to land in exactly the right spot. The lung, it turns out, is one of the hardest addresses in medicine to deliver to.
Nocion's lead program is taplucainium, a first-in-class inhaled treatment for chronic cough now in Phase 2b. The pivotal ASPIRE study is fully enrolled, with topline results expected in the third quarter of 2026. Chronic cough sounds minor until you meet the millions of people who cough hundreds of times a day, who avoid restaurants and meetings and movie theaters, who have been told for years that there is simply nothing left to try. The platform is named, fittingly, after what it acts on - nociceptors, the body's pain and irritation sensors. Nocions.
The BackstoryBefore Nocion, there was a piece of technology almost everyone had given up on. The ARCUS dry-powder platform had been researched for two decades before Advanced Inhalation Research was founded - by MIT's Robert Langer and David Edwards - to finally commercialize it. Batycky was the first employee they hired.
AIR was absorbed by Alkermes. The program drifted. By the mid-to-late 2000s the technology that was supposed to change inhaled medicine was sitting in a drawer. Batycky, by every account, never stopped believing in it. So in 2009 he did the unreasonable thing: he co-founded a company, Civitas Therapeutics, for the express purpose of bringing a shelved platform back to life.
It worked. In roughly three and a half years, Civitas pulled funding from the Michael J. Fox Foundation, posted positive results across three clinical trials, raised two financing rounds, grew past forty employees, and filed for a public offering. Then Acorda Therapeutics bought it in 2014 - the company, the ARCUS platform, and a levodopa inhaler called CVT-301.
Batycky stayed on as Acorda's Chief Technology Officer and carried CVT-301 the rest of the way. In 2018 it crossed the finish line as Inbrija, an FDA-approved inhaled levodopa for the OFF episodes that freeze Parkinson's patients mid-motion. A particle, delivered to the right place, at the right moment. The thing he had been chasing since his first day at AIR.
Why turn off the whole phone when one app is malfunctioning? Conventional approaches quiet pain and irritation broadly. Nocion's charged molecules are built to get specific.
It is the same instinct that runs through his whole resume. Don't flood the body. Find the address. Knock on the right door.
The Company He KeepsA first-in-class drug heading into pivotal data needs a deeper bench, and 2026 has been a year of stacking it. Nocion brought on new leadership and board firepower as ASPIRE moves toward readout.
There is a temptation, with founders like this, to file them under "visionary" and move on. The more accurate word is patient. Inbrija took the better part of two decades from lab idea to pharmacy shelf. Batycky was there for most of it, refusing to let a good idea die quietly in a corporate filing cabinet. Now he's doing it again - this time for the people who can't stop coughing, and for whom the medical world ran out of new answers a lifetime ago.
The ASPIRE results land in the third quarter of 2026. Whatever they say, the thesis will be the same one Batycky has carried since he was the first name on a startup's payroll: stop flooding the body, find the right door, and knock.