A venture capital firm headquartered in the U.S. invests in pre-seed, seed, and opportunistic Series A tech-bio startups across the country. With access to a strong healthcare and life sciences network, the firm connects portfolio companies with strategic partners and resources to accelerate growth. Initial checks typically range from $300K to $1M, often through syndication or co-investment.
The firm focuses on technology-driven biotechnology companies, particularly those leveraging AI, computational biology, and machine learning to achieve breakthroughs in drug development, diagnostics, precision medicine, and other healthcare innovations. It is indication-agnostic and prioritizes startups where technology forms the core of the value proposition and enables scalable impact.
The firm does not enforce rigid requirements on company structure or team experience, instead seeking strong technical foundations, visionary leadership, and a clear path to commercialization.
If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email salescore@lifesciencenation.com.
A venture capital firm invests in transformative mental health deep tech, including psychedelics and neurotechnology. The firm invests in Pre-Seed, Seed, and Series A companies, aiming to bridge the Series A funding gap and democratize access to frontier modalities at scale. Typical initial investments range from $250,000 to $2 million, with the possibility of follow-on funding. The firm is open to both leading and co-investing in deals, and may take board seats or observer roles on a case-by-case basis. It maintains a global investment scope and is not limited to opportunities within the U.S.
The firm focuses on transformative technologies that address mental health challenges. Areas of particular interest include psychedelic medicines, especially non-hallucinogenic neuroplastogens (notably NCEs), and short-duration psychedelic compounds aligned with the Spravato medical model. It also invests in digital therapeutics and neurotechnology designed for mental health applications. While the firm is open to early-phase companies, it has a preference for those with strong IP and patent portfolios. It looks for innovations that can make a significant impact on mental health treatments and patient outcomes and places a strong emphasis on ethical conduct.
The firm does not have strict requirements for founding teams. Its management team, composed of startup founders and operators, provides extensive support to portfolio companies.
If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email salescore@lifesciencenation.com.
The newly proposed 200% pharma tariff threat (not a reality yet, but Trump has indicated they will go into effect on August 1) hasn’t delivered an immediate market shock; biopharma stocks have remained steady, albeit flat. The 12-18 month grace period included in the tariff proposal gives large pharma wiggle room to pivot to US manufacturing while stockpiling to ride out the remaining 2 – 3 years required to make the transition. Predictably, there are concerns that such tariffs could increase drug costs, lead to shortages, impact profit margins (dampening appetite for investment/BD) and disrupt the supply chain.
The tariff threat has, however, catalyzed a strategic pivot toward U.S. manufacturing, with major firms like Biogen, J&J, Eli Lilly, Roche, Sanofi, and Merck spending billions in U.S. facilities.
In the biotech investment and BD community, the question is: how will/has this affect/ed investment and BD activity?
Overall biotech investment may slow as cost inflation pressures biotech valuations and investment capital.
It has been theorized that the pharma tariff threat has contributed to the IPO dry-up in life sciences (nearly all biotech IPOs since 2023 are trading below their IPO price). A continued drought would obviously have a negative impact on biotech venture investment.
If large pharma funnels billions into new manufacturing plants, that money must come from somewhere (usually R&D), and may signal a further slowdown in pharma partnering and investment.
An unpredictable economic environment could deter biotech investment. Such investor caution could lead to more selective funding rounds and a decrease in overall venture capital flowing into the sector.
Finally, it’s well-understood that investors are becoming more selective, focusing on companies with de-risked assets, strong scientific data, and clear commercialization potential.
On the positive side, we see pharma biotech acquisitions up, simply due to how inexpensive small biotechs are to buy right now.
These factors make it far more critical this year than in 2024 or 2023, that you meet with elevated numbers of investment or strategic partners to overcome the above hurdles. Partnering events like RESI are the best way to have 10-20 investor meetings in a day. Using Life Science Nation’s BD Assist, where we set up investor meetings for you, is another option to supercharge your fundraise.
By Greg Mannix, VP, EMEA Business Development, LSN
The first week of December marks the largest life science partnering and venture week in the UK. If you’re raising pre-seed, seed, round A or round B, or are in phase 2 or earlier development, Life Science Nation’s (LSN) RESI London, One Nucleus’ Gensis, and ELRIG/SLAS events offer far better partnering, investment, learning, and procurement opportunities compared to the health care week in late November (concurrent with the Jefferies investment banking event), for a fraction of the cost. That week tends to focus on recent IPOs and companies that are close to IPO, along with phase 3 or more advanced companies looking for partnerships. If you’re not at that stage, save your critical conference and travel budgets for an event series that’s right for you.
RESI London and Gensis are combining to offer a multi-day investment, partnering and thought leadership event for venture stage companies seeking funding and strategic alliances:
December 2nd
Free course on fundraising, including networking, offered by LSN
During the entire week you are also welcome to attend the Genesis Fringe events for free including networking breakfasts, lunches and other events with topics similar to Building a World Class Life Science Ecosystem, Accessing US Investors and Exits, IP Strategies in Advanced Therapy Dealmaking, Top Talent Trends for Life Sciences in 2025 and Pay Transparency, R&D to Commercialization in Rare Diseases, and more.
Join us in the rich life science ecosystem in London during the first week of December. To learn more, contact us at RESI@lifesciencenation.com
MantaBio earned third place in the Innovator’s Pitch Challenge (IPC) at RESI Boston this past June, standing out among a competitive field of early-stage life science companies. In this interview, Co-Founder and President Carter Boisfontaine shares insights into the company’s fundraising efforts, their experience at RESI, and what’s ahead for the team.
Watch the interview:
Interested in pitching your company at RESI?
Applications are now open for the Innovator’s Pitch Challenge at RESI Boston, September 17, 2025. Selected companies receive full access to the conference, partnering meetings with investors, and exhibit space in the RESI Exhibition Hall. New! The September 2025 IPC Pitch Package now includes an optional second RESI pass at no additional cost, allowing an additional team member to attend and participate in partnering. Apply now!
Molecular glue degraders (MGDs) are currently having a bit of a moment. In the first half of 2025, the number of papers describing such compounds has doubled.
Molecular glue uptick in the literature —a doubling of output since the start of the year. (Search based on number of papers indexed in PubMed with search term “molecular glue” in title or abstract. As of June 30, a total of 28 preprints describing molecular glue drugs had been published on BioRxiv/MedRxiv.)
2025 has also witnessed a whole raft of MGD startups publish research related to their programs:
Startup (location)
Scientific founders (location)
2025 paper
Ambagon Therapeutics (Eindhoven, The Netherlands)
Michelle Arkin (UCSF, San Francisco, CA), Luc Brunsveld and Christian Ottman (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Rajesh Chopra and Ian Collins (The Institute of Cancer Research and Cancer Research UK); Nicolas Thomä (Friedrich Miescher Institute, Basel, Switzerland)
Héctor G. Palmer, Esther Riambau, Isabel Puig, Josep Tabernero, Xavier Barril, and Carles Galdeano (Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology, University of Barcelona and ICREA)
On the commercial front, the march of startups receiving funding shows no sign of slowing down, with Trimtech Therapeutics and Booster Therapeutics raising substantive rounds. The first few months of the year have also seen the continuation of last year’s pharma MGD scramble to license programs from Triana Biomedicines and Neomorph, with deals based around molecular glues from Abbvie and Merck targeting Neomorph and Springworks, respectively.
Unlike their more recent cousins, the PROTACs (proteolysis targeting chimeras), MGDs have a long history. The archetypal MGD, thalidomide, was discovered back in the 1950s. From the late 1990s, a new generation of immunomodulatory imide drug (IMiD) derivatives of thalidomide were synthesized, culminating with the approvals of lenalidomide and pomalidomide for myeloma (which formed the basis for the Celgene (now BMS) franchise).
Unlike PROTACs, which use two ligands with a linker and tend to be rather unwieldy, MGDs are small, single compounds that induce conformational changes in E3 ubiquitin ligases and target proteins, reshaping both to enable binding. The vast majority of MGDs bind Cereblon (CRBN), leading to ubiquitination of the protein of interest and degradation in the 26S proteasome, although work is progressing to broaden MGD action to some of the other 600 or so E3 ubiquitin ligases (e.g., DCAF11,15 or 16, DDB1, SIAH, KEAP1, VHL, β-TrCP, Nedd1 and, just last week, TRIM21).
A key challenge in finding new MGDs has been a lack of understanding of the structural rules whereby MGDs turn their target proteins into CRBN ‘neosubstrates’, which has meant MGD ‘hit-finding’ is much more challenging, with fewer degrees of freedom than PROTACs.
What drug hunters have established is that many protein targets of glues contain a β-hairpin structural motif known as the ‘G-loop’. When a MGD brings a target together with CRBN, one end of the MGD interacts with a binding pocket in the C-terminal domain of CRBN, while the other end protrudes from the pocket and interacts with the G-loop (part of the so-called ‘degron’) in the neosubstrate. But how many proteins possess the β-hairpin G-loop or whether the loop is strictly necessary for MGD action have remained open questions. A recent study by Monte Rosa Therapeutics’ scientists starts to tackle these issues, disclosing a large cadre of potential new substrates for CRBN, some of which depart from the canonical β-hairpin G-loop, radically expanding MGD target space.
To map the full range of proteins potentially recruitable by CRBN through MGDs, the team led by John Castle and Sharon Townson developed computational algorithms to search for β-hairpin G-loop motifs in protein structures from two databases: Protein Data Bank and AlphaFold2. This approach resulted in 1424 candidate proteins, some of which were experimentally validated in MGD assays. The list included previously known neosubstrates, but also new proteins such as NEK7—a protein of interest as an autoimmunity target.
The researchers then wondered if the full β-hairpin structure of the G-loop is required for CRBN recognition and rescreened the structure databases looking for a minimal, structurally defined helical G-loop motif. This resulted in the identification of 184 additional potential neosubstrates, including mTOR, a well-established therapeutic target for drugs like rapamycin and sirolimus. Crystallographic data showed that the binding of this helical G-loop to CRBN is similar to that of the canonical β-hairpin G-loops.
As these protein–protein interactions have been well characterized, the team then tried to identify an even wider set of potential neosubstrates, looking now for proteins with sequences that might result in surfaces with electrostatic properties similar to known CRBN interactors, independently of secondary structure and the existence of G-loops. Using surface-matching algorithms, they identified and validated VAV1 (another autoimmune disease target) as a CRBN neosubstrate, providing compelling evidence that G-loops are not strictly necessary for the action of MGDs.
These findings show that CRBN recruitment through MGDs can be driven by a broader set of structural features than previously thought. The identification of a large number of neosubstrates potentially opens up a whole new set of previously ‘undruggable’ targets to MGDs (>1,600 proteins from many target classes, according to the Monte Rosa team).
An expanding protein target universe for MGD drugs. Source: Science
The big questions, though, are still ahead. How will drug developers mitigate the risks of ‘off-tissue’ toxicity as this swathe of novel MGD compounds and new targets make their way into the clinic?One answer to the toxicity concern is molecular glue antibody conjugates (MACs), which can better localize glues to the tissue of interest. But that’s a subject for a whole other future Haystack Chat!
By Greg Mannix, VP, EMEA Business Development, LSN
Are you heading to BioSpain 2025? Maximize your trip by gaining the insider knowledge every early-stage biotech founder needs.
Life Science Nation has teamed up with Asebio, Spain’s leading biotech association, to deliver two high-impact startup training sessions from the LSN Labs Accelerator—offered exclusively on October 6th at the stylish H10 Art Gallery Hotel in Barcelona, the day before BioSpain kicks off.
Choose one or dive into both of these intensive 4-hour modules:
Branding & Messaging from Seed to Series B – Learn how to craft a compelling investor narrative that stands out in a crowded market.
The Nuts & Bolts of a Global Fundraising Campaign – Build a roadmap for launching and executing a successful international raise.
Whether you’re fundraising, partnering, or simply aiming to sharpen your pitch, these workshops are designed to deliver actionable insights that will set you apart at BioSpain—the largest national life science partnering event in Southern Europe.
Seats are limited—don’t miss this opportunity to level up your strategy before the big event.
The firm is focused on therapeutics companies and does not invest in medical devices, diagnostics, or digital health. The firm is open to considering assets of very early stages, even those as early as lead optimization phase. The firm considers various modalities, including antibodies, small molecules, and cell therapy. Currently, the firm is not interested in gene therapy. Indication-wise, the firm is most interested in oncology and autoimmune diseases but has recently looked at fibrotic diseases and certain rare diseases as well.
The firm is opportunistic across all subsectors of healthcare. Within MedTech, the firm is most interested in medical devices, artificial intelligence, robotics, and mobile health. The firm is seeking post-prototype innovations that are FDA cleared or are close to receiving clearance. Within therapeutics, the firm is interested in therapeutics for large disease markets such as oncology, neurology, and metabolic diseases. The firm is open to all modalities with a special interest in immunotherapy and cell therapy.
A strategic investment firm of a large global pharmaceutical makes investments ranging from $5 million to $30 million, acting either as a sole investor or within a syndicate. The firm is open to considering therapeutic opportunities globally, but only if the company is pursuing a market opportunity in the USA and is in dialogue with the US FDA.
The firm is currently looking for new investment opportunities in enterprise software, medical devices, and the healthcare IT space. The firm will invest in 510k devices and healthcare IT companies, and it is very opportunistic in terms of indications. In the past, the firm was active in medical device companies developing dental devices, endovascular innovation devices, and women’s health devices.
A venture capital firm founded in 2005 has multiple offices throughout Asia, New York, and San Diego. The firm has closed its fifth fund in 2017 and is currently raising a sixth fund, which the firm is targeting to be the largest fund to date. The firm continues to actively seek investment opportunities across a […]
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