Plexium is a San Diego precision medicine company designing small-molecule protein degraders - monovalent direct degraders and molecular glues - that switch off disease-driving proteins traditionally considered undruggable. Its DELTA Discovery platform runs ultra-high-throughput cell-based screening to find and optimize new degrader chemistry across cancer and neurological disease.
Prosetta Biosciences is a San Francisco biotech using a proprietary cell-free protein synthesis and assembly (CFPSA) platform to discover small-molecule 'assembly modulators' - drugs that disrupt the multi-protein complexes behind viral infection, cancer, and neurodegeneration. Founded by UCSF physician-scientist Vishwanath Lingappa, the company is advancing candidates against ALS/FTD, Alzheimer's, pan-cancer targets, and antivirals.
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.
Trace Neuroscience is a South San Francisco biopharmaceutical company developing genomic medicines for neurodegenerative diseases, starting with ALS. Its lead program, TRCN-1023, is an antisense oligonucleotide designed to restore UNC13A protein function - a target genetically validated in roughly 97% of people living with ALS - by correcting the faulty RNA splicing caused by TDP-43 dysfunction. The company launched in November 2024 with a $101 million Series A led by Third Rock Ventures and entered the clinic in 2026.
Christin Glorioso, MD, PhD, is a physician-scientist and serial entrepreneur who is CEO and co-founder of NeuroAge Therapeutics, a San Francisco brain-health company building AI-powered 'aging clocks' for the human brain. Trained at MIT and the Carnegie Mellon/University of Pittsburgh Medical Scientist Training Program, she spent two decades studying how brains age before leaving academia to turn that research into a diagnostic and drug-development engine. NeuroAge combines MRI brain-volume data, cognitive testing and proprietary RNA blood biomarkers - validated on data from more than 500,000 people - to estimate brain age and dementia risk decades before symptoms. She also founded the nonprofit Longevity Global and led the world's top-ranked US COVID-19 forecasting model in the XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge.
Scott Greenberg is the Chief Business Officer of Nura Bio, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company in South San Francisco building small-molecule drugs to stop nerves from dying. He joined in February 2025 to steer business development and corporate strategy as the company pushes its lead SARM1 inhibitor, NB-4746, into the clinic. He arrives with more than two decades crossing the line between finance and biology - a Goldman Sachs banking start, more than a decade at Celgene, an operations leadership role at Roivant Sciences, and a stint as Chief Operating Officer at Aro Biotherapeutics. He studied both Finance and the Biological Basis of Behavior at the University of Pennsylvania before an MBA at Harvard.
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.
Augustine Therapeutics is a Belgian clinical-stage biotech spun out of VIB-KU Leuven that is building a next-generation class of selective HDAC6 inhibitors for chronic diseases. Using a proprietary non-hydroxamate, non-hydrazide chemotype, the company designs molecules that block HDAC6's harmful catalytic activity while sparing its beneficial functions - aiming to avoid the toxicity that stalled earlier inhibitors. Its lead candidate, AGT-100216, is the first selective HDAC6 inhibitor to enter the clinic for Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, with a pipeline extending into neurodegenerative and cardio-metabolic indications.
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 (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.
Circular Genomics is a San Diego biotechnology company turning circular RNA (circRNA) into a new class of blood-based biomarkers for brain health. Spun out of the University of New Mexico in 2021, the company uses brain-enriched circRNAs that cross the blood-brain barrier and stay stable in whole blood to detect and predict neurological and psychiatric conditions, from Alzheimer's disease to major depressive disorder. Its goal is to replace guesswork in brain care with measurable, actionable data, starting with early Alzheimer's detection and SSRI treatment-response testing for depression.
Andrew Dervan is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Cajal Neuroscience (Cajal Therapeutics), a Seattle biotech that launched in 2022 with $96 million to rethink how drugs for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other neurodegenerative diseases are discovered. A Harvard-trained physician with an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from Yale, he spent years leading cell therapy and immuno-oncology business development at Celgene and Bristol Myers Squibb. Unusually for a biotech CEO, he still sees patients as a practicing clinical geneticist at the University of Washington, evaluating people with adult-onset neurological conditions.
Nura Bio is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company in South San Francisco developing brain-penetrant, small-molecule neuroprotective medicines. Its work centers on SARM1, an injury-activated NAD hydrolase that triggers axon degeneration, an early and common event across many neurological diseases. The lead candidate, NB-4746, is an oral, brain-penetrant SARM1 inhibitor that completed Phase 1 in healthy volunteers and shows protection in preclinical models of ALS, MS, traumatic brain injury and chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy. The company has raised more than $140 million in Series A financing led by The Column Group.
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 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.
Joanne Kotz is a chemist-turned-biotech-CEO who runs Atalanta Therapeutics, a Boston company using divalent siRNA to silence disease-causing genes throughout the brain and spinal cord. She took the top job in June 2025 after co-founding and leading Jnana Therapeutics from a blank slate to a roughly $1 billion acquisition by Otsuka. Before founding companies she helped build them from the science up, as a director at the Broad Institute, a leader of F-Prime's neurodegeneration initiative, and the founding editor of Nature Chemical Biology. Her career runs an unusual loop: bench scientist, science journal editor, partnership architect, founder, and now CEO of a company chasing some of the hardest diseases in the central nervous system.
Vesalius Therapeutics is a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech founded by Flagship Pioneering that aims to reconceptualize how common diseases are understood and treated. Its premise: illnesses that drive roughly 90% of human disease burden are not single conditions but constellations of genetically and biologically distinct diseases. Vesalius uses AI, human genetics and genomics, and patient-derived iPSC cell models to spot hidden clinical patterns, trace them to causal gene circuits, and discover novel drug targets for conditions like Parkinson's, heart failure, type 2 diabetes, and Alzheimer's.
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.
Ron Cohen, M.D., is a biotech entrepreneur with a 30-year record of building companies that ship medicines for the nervous system. He founded Acorda Therapeutics in 1995 from his apartment and grew it into a public company that brought multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's therapies to market. After Acorda's sale to Merz in 2024, he evaluated roughly two dozen startups before taking the CEO seat at Oryon Cell Therapies in March 2026, a Belmont, Massachusetts company developing autologous neuron replacement therapy for Parkinson's. He is a past Chair of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO).
Shilpa Sambashivan is the CEO and a co-founder of Nura Bio, a South San Francisco biotech building brain-penetrant small molecules that aim to stop nerves from dying. A protein biochemist by training, she helped spin the company out of academic labs in 2018, built its R&D engine as Chief Scientific Officer, and was elevated to CEO in September 2024 alongside a $68M Series A extension that pushed total funding past $140M. Her lead drug, NB-4746, blocks the SARM1 enzyme that triggers axon self-destruction.
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.
Asa Abeliovich is a physician-scientist turned serial biotech founder who spent two decades at the lab bench at Columbia before deciding the only way to get his ideas into patients was to start companies. He co-founded Alector, founded and sold Prevail Therapeutics to Eli Lilly for about $1 billion, and now runs Leal Therapeutics, a Worcester startup chasing a contrarian idea: that fixing the brain's broken metabolism can treat everything from schizophrenia to ALS to Alzheimer's. Leal spent over two years in stealth before surfacing with a clinical-stage pipeline and roughly $114 million raised.
insitro is a machine-learning-driven drug discovery and development company that uses high-content human data, cellular models and AI to find better targets and design better medicines. Founded in 2018 by Daphne Koller, the company runs its own therapeutic pipeline and partners with large pharma on programs in ALS, metabolic disease and oncology.
Jennifer Cygan is a seasoned biotech executive and Chief Business Officer at EpiBiologics, where she helps advance a pipeline of novel bispecific antibodies designed to selectively degrade extracellular protein targets in oncology and immunology. With a Ph.D. from Harvard and over two decades of business leadership in biotechnology, she has been a pivotal force at Genentech, Calico Life Sciences (managing a $2.5B AbbVie alliance), and has co-founded and served as CBO for multiple emerging biotech companies including Broadwing Bio, Eikon Therapeutics, GenEdit, and Plexium. Her career sits at the intersection of science and strategy - translating cutting-edge biology into deals, partnerships, and companies that matter.