secretory-pathway
(2)
Avenue Biosciences
Avenue Biosciences is a transatlantic biotech building the first platform to measure and modulate the cellular secretory pathway at scale. Spun out of the University of Helsinki and headquartered between Helsinki and Palo Alto, the company pairs high-throughput chemistry with machine learning to design signal peptides and boost yields of therapeutic proteins - biologics, biosimilars, and mRNA-encoded medicines - so that production bottlenecks stop limiting which therapies reach patients.
Jordi Mata-Fink
Jordi Mata-Fink is the co-founder and CEO of Gate Bioscience, a Brisbane, California biotech building an entirely new class of small-molecule drugs called Molecular Gates. The idea is deceptively simple and technically audacious: instead of chasing disease-causing proteins after they leave the cell, Gate's molecules park inside the cell's secretory channel (Sec61) and selectively stop a single harmful protein from ever getting out, while letting everything else pass. A chemical engineer trained at Stanford and MIT, Mata-Fink spent years inside Flagship Pioneering helping spin up companies like Editas and Rubius before founding Gate in 2021. The company emerged from stealth in 2023 with $60M, and in November 2025 raised an oversubscribed $65M Series B led by Forbion with Eli Lilly joining, pushing total funding to $135M as it heads toward the clinic. He coaches youth soccer on the side.