alzheimers
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StartUp Health Wants to Put the Right People in the Room
A $499 annual membership is the latest expression of a 15-year bet: health startups need buyers, backers, and each other. StartUp Health is turning that belief into a business built around shared medical missions.
The Toy Guys Who Sold 750,000 Robot Cats to Fight Loneliness
A former Hasbro team took a $60-to-$180 robotic cat, aimed it at grandparents instead of grandkids, and turned play into a public-health tool. State agencies now hand the pets out by the thousands.
Eli Lilly and Company
The company that mass-produced insulin now runs on a molecule that helps people lose weight. Inside the 150-year-old Indianapolis drugmaker that became a trillion-dollar bet on metabolism.
Neuroglee Health
Neuroglee Health is a Boston-based digital health company building value-based, at-home dementia and cognitive care. It pairs a virtual interdisciplinary clinical team - advanced practice nurses, social workers, pharmacists and care navigators supervised by neurologists and geriatric psychiatrists - with evidence-based digital therapeutics to support patients with mild cognitive impairment through late-stage dementia and their care partners. Founded in 2020 by Aniket Singh Rajput, the company works with Mayo Clinic on its Neuroglee Connect platform and participates in the CMS GUIDE Model to deliver comprehensive, longitudinal dementia care to Medicare beneficiaries at no cost to families.
Therini Bio, Inc.
Therini Bio is a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing fibrin-targeting immunotherapies for neurodegenerative and retinal diseases driven by vascular dysfunction. Founded in 2019 on the neurovascular research of Dr. Katerina Akassoglou at UCSF and the Gladstone Institutes, the company's lead antibody THN391 selectively blocks fibrin's inflammatory epitope to halt chronic neuroinflammation without interfering with normal blood clotting. Backed by roughly $145M in total funding from investors including Eli Lilly, Sanofi Ventures, Merck's MRL Ventures and the Dementia Discovery Fund, Therini is advancing THN391 into Phase 1b trials for Alzheimer's disease and diabetic macular edema.
Ceresti Health
Ceresti Health is a Carlsbad, California digital-health company that turns family caregivers into the front line of dementia care. Through a cell-enabled tablet, weekly one-on-one coaching from a personal care navigator, and claims-driven predictive analytics, Ceresti helps spouses and adult children spot the small changes - a urinary tract infection, a missed medication - that otherwise snowball into costly hospitalizations. The company sells to Medicare Advantage plans, ACOs, and providers operating under the CMS GUIDE payment model, and backs its program with a documented cost-savings guarantee: more than 50% fewer avoidable hospitalizations and roughly $6,800 in medical savings per enrolled patient per year.
Switch Therapeutics
Switch Therapeutics is a South San Francisco preclinical biotech building conditionally activated siRNA (CASi) therapies that only switch on inside the cell types where they're needed. The platform - born from research at Caltech, Harvard and City of Hope - aims to make RNA interference safe enough for the brain, with a lead program targeting APOE for Alzheimer's disease.
Unlearn.AI
Unlearn.AI is a San Francisco biotech-AI company that builds disease-specific machine learning models to generate digital twins of clinical trial participants - longitudinal predictions of how each patient would have fared on placebo. Folded into a statistical method called PROCOVA and a trial design called TwinRCT, the approach lets sponsors shrink control arms by up to a third, so more patients receive the experimental drug while trials reach answers faster. Founded in 2017 by physicists Charles Fisher, Aaron Smith and Jon Walsh, the company has raised about $130M and earned a first-of-its-kind EMA qualification for an AI-based method to reduce sample size in pivotal trials.
AltPep
AltPep is a Seattle biotech company spun out of the University of Washington that is building both diagnostic tests and disease-modifying drugs for amyloid diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Its work is anchored on the alpha-sheet, a non-standard protein structure discovered by founder and CEO Valerie Daggett, which forms in the toxic soluble oligomers that appear at the earliest, pre-symptomatic stages of disease. AltPep's SOBA blood test aims to flag those toxic oligomers years before symptoms, while its SOBIN peptide therapeutics are designed to neutralize them.
Bexorg, Inc.
Bexorg is a New Haven techbio company that perfuses donated, postmortem human and pig brains with custom-made artificial blood to restore their molecular and metabolic activity, turning whole organs into living-tissue testbeds for drug discovery. Its BrainEx wet-lab platform and XO Digital AI engine generate petabyte-scale human brain datasets that let pharmaceutical partners test therapies in human-relevant tissue before costly clinical trials - a direct response to the roughly 95% failure rate of central-nervous-system drugs.
Cajal Therapeutics
Cajal Therapeutics (originally launched as Cajal Neuroscience) is a Seattle biotechnology company developing novel medicines to restore biological homeostasis, with a focus on neurodegenerative diseases, anemias of inflammation, and iron-related disorders. Built on a platform that pairs integrative human genetics, high-throughput functional genomics, and industrialized whole-brain imaging with deep neuroscience expertise, the company aims to systematically validate disease targets at unprecedented scale and translate them into small molecule and RNA therapeutics. It launched in November 2022 with a $96 million Series A and counts a roster of celebrated neuroscientists among its co-founders.
OncoC4, Inc.
OncoC4, Inc. is a Rockville, Maryland clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company building first-in-class and best-in-class antibody therapies for hard-to-treat cancers and Alzheimer's disease. Founded by immunologists Yang Liu and Pan Zheng, the company discovered the innate immune checkpoint CD24-Siglec-10 and is advancing a pipeline led by gotistobart (ONC-392), a next-generation anti-CTLA-4 antibody partnered with BioNTech, alongside SIGLEC10, PD-1/VEGF, and CD24-targeting programs.
Retro Biosciences
Retro Biosciences is a clinical-stage longevity biotech in Redwood City, California with a single, unsubtle goal: add ten healthy years to the human lifespan. Founded in 2018 and launched publicly in 2021 with $180 million from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the company attacks aging at the cellular level across three platforms - autophagy enhancement, cellular reprogramming, and plasma-inspired therapeutics. Its lead drug, RTR242, an autophagy-restoring small molecule aimed at Alzheimer's disease, entered a first-in-human Phase 1 trial in 2025. A 2026 raise valued Retro at $1.8 billion.
Neural Galaxy
Neural Galaxy (also operating as Galaxy Brain Scientific) is a Beijing-based brain science company building a precision, non-invasive neuromodulation platform. Its proprietary personalized Brain Functional Sectors (pBFS) technology maps over 200 functional regions of an individual brain, then guides targeted transcranial magnetic stimulation with millimeter accuracy. Founded in 2019 by Harvard and MIT neuroscientists with serial entrepreneur Coach Wei, the company is running clinical and registration trials across depression, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, autism and aphasia, and has raised roughly $93M to date.
Leal Therapeutics
Leal Therapeutics is a Worcester, Massachusetts biotech founded in 2021 by repeat CNS entrepreneur Asa Abeliovich, the scientist behind Prevail Therapeutics (acquired by Eli Lilly). Leal builds first-in-class neuro-metabolic medicines on a single idea: many brain diseases share a broken metabolism, and correcting those imbalances can treat conditions from schizophrenia to ALS. Backed by roughly $114M in total funding, its pipeline includes LTX-001, a brain-penetrant oral glutaminase inhibitor in the clinic, and LTX-002, an antisense oligonucleotide for ALS.