Paratus Sciences is a biotechnology company decoding the extreme biology of bats to discover first-in-class medicines. Bats live long, tolerate viruses, resist cancer, control inflammation and thrive on high-sugar diets - traits they evolved over roughly 65 million years. Paratus integrates cell biology, comparative genomics and informatics to translate these adaptations into drug targets for inflammatory and cardiometabolic diseases. Launched in 2023 with a $100M Series A and dual sites in New York and Singapore, its lead program PS-1001 is a first-in-class pan-inflammasome inhibitor.
Immetas Therapeutics is a New Jersey biotech building drugs that target the chronic, low-grade inflammation that drives aging and age-related disease - what scientists call 'inflammaging.' Founded in 2018 by drug-development veteran J. Gene Wang and Harvard aging researcher David Sinclair, the company designs bispecific antibodies and other biologics to reprogram the innate immune system, aiming to treat age-related cancers and inflammatory and autoimmune disease. It raised an $11M Series A from Morningside Ventures in 2020 and partners with GC Biopharma on mRNA therapeutics.
Olatec Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company in New York developing a platform of oral NLRP3 inflammasome inhibitors to treat acute and chronic inflammatory diseases. Its lead compound, dapansutrile (OLT1177), is a selective small-molecule NLRP3 inhibitor that has shown clinical benefit and a clean safety profile across gout, heart failure and a broad range of inflammatory and neuroinflammatory conditions, positioning oral inflammasome blockade as a potential alternative to injectable IL-1 biologics.
Damaris Skouras is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Olatec Therapeutics, a New York clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company built around dapansutrile, an oral, specific NLRP3 inflammasome inhibitor she has pushed from the lab bench into Phase 2 trials spanning gout, melanoma, type 2 diabetes, and Parkinson's disease. She started in finance as a Wall Street biotech banker in 1982, founded her own investment advisory firm in 1985, and eventually crossed the table to run the kind of company she used to finance. With a Stanford degree, a Harvard MBA, and the immunologist who discovered interleukin-1 as her co-founder, she has raised over $100 million to bet that a single inflammatory switch can be turned off across a range of diseases.