translational-medicine
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The Durham Investor That Treats Venture Capital Like a Clinical Program
Pappas Capital has spent three decades turning laboratory risk into investable milestones. Its edge is less about chasing crowded hubs than combining drug-development judgment, company-building work and patient capital from a base in Research Triangle Park.
Scorpion Therapeutics
Scorpion Therapeutics was a Boston-based, clinical-stage precision oncology company built to advance what it called "Precision Oncology 2.0" - pairing cancer biology, computational chemistry, medicinal chemistry and genomics to design small-molecule drugs against cancer targets that had resisted earlier approaches. Founded in 2020 by a group of prominent scientists and biotech operators, it raised more than $440 million and built a pipeline of mutant-selective inhibitors, most notably the PI3K-alpha inhibitor STX-478 and a franchise of fourth-generation EGFR inhibitors. In January 2025 Eli Lilly agreed to acquire the company and its PI3K-alpha program in a deal worth up to $2.5 billion, while Scorpion's remaining pipeline and staff were spun into a new independent company, Antares Therapeutics.
NeoPhore Ltd
NeoPhore is a UK small-molecule immuno-oncology company developing first-in-class inhibitors of the DNA mismatch repair (MMR) pathway. By temporarily switching off MMR, its drugs are designed to make tumours generate fresh neoantigens, become visible to the immune system, and respond to checkpoint immunotherapy - extending the benefit of drugs like Keytruda to patients whose cancers are otherwise immune-cold. A 2017 spin-out of Cambridge's PhoreMost, NeoPhore has raised roughly $47M and counts Bristol Myers Squibb and Memorial Sloan Kettering among its backers and collaborators.
Superfluid Dx, Inc.
Superfluid Dx is a South San Francisco diagnostics company building a blood-based test for Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative conditions. Its platform isolates cell-free messenger RNA (cf-mRNA) from a single tube of blood and pairs next-generation sequencing with RNA deconvolution and machine-learning analysis to read out organ-level biology - aiming to detect disease years earlier than conventional methods and to guide therapy. The company was formed in late 2023 when WRQ Sciences acquired and renamed Molecular Stethoscope, and is led by Fluidigm co-founder Gajus Worthington alongside Stanford bioengineer and serial founder Steve Quake.
Verge Genomics
Verge Genomics is a South San Francisco biotech that builds drugs from human biology instead of mouse models. By assembling one of the largest proprietary multi-omics datasets drawn directly from human brain and tissue samples, then mining it with machine learning, its CONVERGE platform identifies disease targets and drug candidates for neurodegenerative diseases like ALS, ALS-FTD and Parkinson's. Founded in 2015 by Alice Zhang and Jason Chen, the company famously moved its first AI-discovered drug from research to the clinic in four years. After that ALS candidate failed its early trial, Verge has refocused on its core asset, the platform, repositioning to supply other drug developers with human-grounded target data.