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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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.
Rick Batycky is a chemical engineer turned biotech founder who has spent two decades coaxing medicines into the lungs. As President and CEO of Nocion Therapeutics, he is developing a new class of charged sodium channel blockers built to silence overactive sensory neurons and finally quiet refractory chronic cough. Before Nocion he co-founded Civitas Therapeutics, revived a dormant inhalation platform, and carried the dry-powder levodopa therapy Inbrija through to FDA approval as Acorda's CTO.