
He took the name from the brightest star in the Scorpius constellation. Now Adam Friedman is betting a Boston biotech, and up to $1.9 billion in deals, on drugging the targets everyone else called impossible.
Valerie Daggett is a University of Washington bioengineering professor turned biotech founder who spent three decades running the world's largest collection of protein-folding simulations, stumbled onto a structure nature was not supposed to make, and built a company around it. As founder and CEO of Seattle-based AltPep, she is commercializing the alpha-sheet: a strange protein geometry her lab predicted on a computer before anyone confirmed it in a test tube. Her SOBA-AD blood test, which spots toxic amyloid oligomers years before symptoms, earned FDA Breakthrough Device Designation and put her at the front of the race to catch Alzheimer's early.
Huafeng Xu is the founder and CEO of Fathom Therapeutics (formerly AtomMap), a New York drug-design company that simulates protein motion at atomic resolution to design small molecules that work inside living cells. A computational chemist with 25+ years and 10,000+ citations, Xu spent 12 years at D. E. Shaw Research building the free-energy and molecular-dynamics methods now standard across pharma, then served as CTO of Silicon Therapeutics and Roivant Discovery before launching his own company. In April 2026 Fathom closed an oversubscribed $47M Series A led by Sutter Hill Ventures to scale its Microcosmos engine.