He spent twenty years inside big pharma learning exactly what he wanted to do differently. Then he built a quiet lab in Waltham to do it.
A startup hunting drugs with genuinely new mechanisms for brain disorders.
Most drug hunters start by picking a molecular target and then build a medicine to hit it. Tom Large built a career out of refusing to start there. At Sunovion, the group he ran pioneered a target-agnostic approach to discovering drugs for the central nervous system - let the biology of the disease point toward the mechanism, rather than betting the whole program on a fashionable receptor. That gamble produced SEP-363856, an experimental schizophrenia drug that went on to earn an FDA Breakthrough Therapy designation. It is the kind of result that would let most executives coast for a decade.
Large did the opposite. In 2016 he co-founded Blue Oak Pharmaceuticals and took the CEO seat, planting a small flag in Waltham, Massachusetts with a deceptively simple mission: find the next generation of medicines for brain disorders. Not better versions of what already exists - genuinely new mechanisms for conditions where the science has been stuck for a generation. Bipolar depression. Schizophrenia. Treatment-resistant depression. The hard problems that big pharma has quietly retreated from.
Blue Oak spent its early years operating largely under the radar. There were no splashy launch headlines, no parade of conference keynotes. Instead Large built alliances. In 2017 the company announced a drug discovery partnership with PsychoGenics. By 2021 it had teamed up with Exscientia, the UK artificial-intelligence specialist, to design what the field calls bispecific small molecules - compounds engineered to engage two drug targets at once. For neuropsychiatric illness, where single-target drugs so often disappoint, hitting two carefully chosen targets together is a bet that the brain's complexity demands more than one lever.
Under his direction the research teams pushed roughly 13 experimental drugs through varying stages of development - an unusual output for a company most people have never heard of. The work attracted federal backing too: the National Institute of Mental Health awarded Blue Oak a competitive SBIR grant to develop next-generation therapies for bipolar depression, a disorder that affects roughly 6 million American adults. The goal stated in that grant is almost defiantly ambitious - drugs with rapid-onset and sustained antidepressant efficacy, and a safer profile than what patients have today.
With Blue Oak's deep knowledge of complex neuropsychiatric illness, we will look at carefully chosen target combinations for psychiatric patients.
Large did not arrive at the CEO chair from a business school. He arrived from the bench. He earned a PhD in neurobiology and physiology from Northwestern University, then completed a Howard Hughes Medical Institute postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco - the kind of training reserved for scientists expected to run their own labs. For a stretch he did exactly that, as a faculty member in the Department of Neurosciences at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.
Then he crossed into industry. At Eli Lilly he was a scientific and group leader in neuroscience research, managing projects that produced therapeutic candidates for anxiety, psychosis and pain, and helping push novel target approaches across central-nervous-system, endocrine and oncology programs. From there he moved to Sunovion as Senior Vice President of Preclinical Research and Translational Medicine, where he spent the better part of a decade turning the target-agnostic philosophy into a working pipeline. By the time he left to start Blue Oak, he had touched nearly every rung of the drug-discovery ladder - academic, scientist, big-pharma executive, and now founder.
That range is the point. Drug discovery for the brain is a discipline where the people who understand the biology rarely run the company, and the people who run the company rarely understand the biology. Large is both, which is why his contrarian instinct - don't pick the target first - carries weight rather than just sounding clever. He has also lent that judgment to others, joining the scientific advisory board of Verge Genomics in 2019 to help advance its candidates for ALS and Parkinson's disease.
Psychiatric medicine has a credibility problem. Many of its workhorse drugs are decades old, discovered by accident, and refined mostly at the margins. Patients with bipolar depression or treatment-resistant depression often cycle through option after option, waiting weeks for relief that may never fully arrive. Large's wager is that the breakthrough will not come from polishing the old mechanisms but from finding new ones - and that the tools to find them, from systems neurobiology to AI-designed molecules, have finally caught up to the ambition. Whether Blue Oak delivers a marketed medicine is still an open question. But the approach is a clear argument: the next psychiatric breakthrough should not look like the last one.
Profile compiled from public sources including company announcements, trade press, the NIH grant record and partner press releases. Biographical specifics reflect publicly available information at time of writing.
Howard Hughes postdoctoral fellow at UC San Francisco; later a faculty member in neurosciences at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.
Scientific and group leader in neuroscience research - projects spanning anxiety, psychosis and pain.
SVP, Preclinical Research & Translational Medicine. Pioneered a target-agnostic CNS approach that produced SEP-363856 for schizophrenia (later FDA Breakthrough Therapy).
Co-founds Blue Oak Pharmaceuticals in Waltham, MA, and becomes CEO.
Announces drug discovery partnership with PsychoGenics.
Wins NIH/NIMH SBIR grant to develop next-generation bipolar depression therapies.
Joins the scientific advisory board of Verge Genomics (ALS, Parkinson's).
Blue Oak raises ~$9M; partners with AI firm Exscientia on bispecific neuropsychiatric molecules.
The target-agnostic method lets disease biology point toward the right mechanism, instead of betting an entire program on a fashionable receptor.
With Exscientia's AI platform, Blue Oak designs bispecific small molecules - compounds built to engage two brain targets at once.
The NIH-backed bipolar program chases rapid-onset, sustained antidepressant efficacy with a safer profile than today's options.
Some founders chase the spotlight. Large built strategic alliances before he built a press list - Blue Oak operated quietly for years while assembling its partnerships. He named the company after something deep-rooted and unhurried, fitting for a man playing a very long game against very hard diseases.
First-in-class medicines with genuinely new mechanisms - drugs that act faster, last longer and are safer - for the brain disorders medicine has struggled most to treat.