A venture capital firm with a major presence in Europe invests in life science companies through various funds. The firm targets seed, venture, and growth-stage investments in European companies but also considers North American and Asian opportunities. Initial investment size ranges from €500K – 10M, preferentially in the form of straight equity. The firm is capable of leading or co-investing in financing rounds; however, for U.S. deals, the firm prefers a local investor to lead unless it is a later-stage round (i.e., B, C, etc.) and the prior round was led by a U.S. investor. The firm has greater flexibility for European-based companies and typically leads these rounds. The firm is currently in investing mode, actively seeking opportunities, with the average investment ranging from €3–5M.
The firm takes a true venture approach to investing and prioritizes breakthrough technologies with a strong IP position. Microbiome therapeutics and platforms are the primary interest, with willingness to invest as early as pre-clinical in this subsector. For other therapeutics, preferred phases of development are typically limited to pre-clinical investments into companies with a platform technology rather than those reliant on a single therapeutic asset. Medical technology and connected health companies are also evaluated, regardless of stage.
The firm prefers to work with mature, experienced management teams but is open to all entrepreneurs. The firm will invest in pre-revenue as well as revenue-generating companies, with maximum revenues of €50M.
If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email salescore@lifesciencenation.com.
A global venture capital investor builds, incubates, and invests in biotech companies. The firm invests from an evergreen fund and prefers to invest at company formation or seed stage, with the latest stage being Series A. Typical investments range from $1-5M, but larger tranched investments may be made in therapeutic opportunities. With offices across multiple global hubs, the firm invests worldwide. The firm can act as either a lead or a co-investor.
The firm’s investment strategy focuses on disruptive therapeutics platform technologies and novel therapeutic modalities.
The firm prefers to back teams with a strong track record but is also open to first-time entrepreneurs. At company formation, the firm not only provides funding for initial proof-of-concept studies, but also supports the assembly of the founding team and other essential business development activities.
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 founded in 2018 and based in the US actively invests in early-stage life science and healthcare companies with a focus on seed stage opportunities, investing up to $1M. The firm invests mostly in US, Europe, and Israel.
The firm focuses on 2 areas: longevity and AI / future of healthcare. The firm is open to investing in therapeutics, medical devices, diagnostics, and digital health and will consider promising opportunities outside of these focus areas.
The firm does not have specific management team requirements. The firm can lead or co-invest, and will typically seek board representation when leading investment rounds.
If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email salescore@lifesciencenation.com.
A venture capital investor primarily makes angel investments in seed-stage companies and works hands-on with portfolio companies to facilitate regulatory approval and commercialization. Typical initial check size is in the $500–750K range, with tranche investments possible beyond this amount. The firm is open to global opportunities.
The firm focuses on therapeutics companies in the early stages of drug discovery and development. Current areas of interest include CNS and neurodegenerative diseases, oncology, and pulmonary diseases pursued with novel approaches. While the firm works primarily with pre-clinical opportunities, it may consider other indications from time to time.
The firm’s long-term strategy is to help companies progress toward Phase II readiness for pre-clinical assets. With broad expertise in regulatory and toxicology matters, the firm takes a hands-on approach to supporting portfolio companies.
If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email salescore@lifesciencenation.com.
By Joey Wong, Director of Investor Research, Hong Kong BD, LSN
Many large corporations establish ventures or innovation arms to invest in and partner with life science and healthcare startups. Unlike traditional institutional VCs, corporate venture capital (CVC) groups bring unique strategies, goals, and ties to their parent organizations. Some CVCs focus closely on opportunities that align with the corporation’s core businesses, while others pursue innovation beyond existing portfolios, creating broader avenues for collaboration.
This 50-minute discussion will bring together leaders from corporate venture arms of global pharma, biotech, medtech, and healthcare corporations. Panelists will share how they evaluate early-stage opportunities, what distinguishes their investment criteria from institutional VCs, and how they balance strategic alignment with financial return. Startups will also gain valuable perspective on how to approach CVCs, what additional benefits they can expect beyond funding, and how relationships and collaboration may evolve post-investment.
For entrepreneurs seeking strategic partners, this session offers a chance to hear directly from active CVC investors about how they drive innovation, accelerate R&D, and bring transformative solutions to the market.
Andrew Merken Shareholder Polsinelli PC
(Moderator)
Komeil Nasrollahi Sr. Director Innovation & Venture Partnerships Siemens Healthineers
Claire Leurent Managing Director AbbVie Ventures
Jeffrey Moore President MP Healthcare Venture Management (MPH)
Alex de Winter VP of New Ventures Danaher Corporation
Join us at RESI Boston this September to take part in this discussion and connect with investors across the life science and healthcare ecosystem.
While most parts of biotech early-stage financing have been in the doldrums in the past two or three years, so-called tech-bio startups have been thriving. Since the posterchild $1.0 billion mega series A round last April of Xaira Therapeutics, which was founded by scientists out of Nobel prize winner David Baker’s group at the University of Washington, several startups seeking to develop machine learning models for designing miniproteins or peptide binders of challenging or ‘undruggable’ targets have emerged, including Enlaza Therapeutics, Vilya, and UbiquiTx. All of these have been developing their own proprietary models based on Alphafold 3, Boltz-1 or Chai-1 for structure prediction and tools based off RFdiffusion, Bindcraft and ProteinMPNN for peptide design. Predicting CDR loops for de novo antibody design is a considerably more challenging task than for simple peptides, but Nabla Bio, founded last year by scientists out of George Church’s lab at Harvard, claims it is doing just that for GPCRs and ion channels. Earlier this month, Chai Discovery also launched with a $100 million series A from Menlo Ventures to optimize multimodal generative models such as Chai-2, which, according to the company, already “achieves a 16% hit rate in de novo antibody design.”
Designing peptides that can selectively bind to a protein target and show therapeutic activity remains a challenge, however, as it often depends on the availability of high-quality structural information about the target molecule, which is seldom available for many disease-relevant proteins that are unstructured or conformationally disordered. Similarly modeling protein-protein interactions like antibody-antigen interactions that are extremely dynamic and floppy also poses problems. All of which raises the question as to whether binders could be predicted simply using amino acid sequence information instead of structural data.
Now, a team led by Pranam Chatterjee from Duke University has addressed this question. In a recent paper in Nature Biotechnology, Chatterjee and his collaborators report the creation of PepMLM, a peptide binder design algorithm based on masked language modeling. A key feature of the algorithm is that it depends exclusively on protein sequence, not structure. Built upon the ESM-2 (Evolutionary Scale Modeling 2) protein language model, PepMLM masks and reconstructs entire peptide regions appended to target protein sequences. This design compels the model to generate context-specific binders. To train PepMLM, the team used high-quality curated datasets from PepNN and Propedia comprising ~10k putative peptide-protein sequence pairs. PepMLM output was consistently found to outperform RFDiffusion on held-out/structured targets, with a higher hit rate (38% to 29%) and low perplexities that closely matched real binders, with generated sequences showing target specificity, even in stringent permutation tests.
The PepMLM model is trained by labeling with ~10k putative target protein-peptide sequence pairs and is built with a target protein sequence and a masked binder region. During the generation phase, the model has a target protein sequence and then mask the binder to facilitate the prediction of peptides of specified lengths. (Source: Nature Biotechnology)
The model generated binders predicted to have higher binding scores than native and structure-based binders designed through other methods. Indeed, in vitro validation experiments confirmed the high affinity and specificity of PepMLM-generated binders.
Structural comparison of PepMLM-designed binders (red) and experimental test binders (blue), with contact residues in target proteins H-2Kb MHC complex (2OI9)and Lck tyrosine kinase (1LCK) (gray) shown in corresponding colors. (Source: Nature Biotechnology).
Chatterjee and his colleagues went on to turn their binders into degraders by fusing them to E3 ubiquitin ligase domains, such as CHIP/STUB1. When tested in vitro, over 60% of these degraders knocked down their target proteins. PepMLM peptides achieved nanomolar binding affinity on the drug targets neural cell adhesion molecule 1 (NCAM1), a key marker of acute myeloid leukemia, and anti-Müllerian hormone type 2 receptor (AMHR2), a critical regulator of polycystic ovarian syndrome (where RFDiffusion-predicted peptides failed to bind). The authors also demonstrated that PepMLM-predicted peptides fused to E3 ubiquitin ligases not only degraded MSH3 but completely eliminated mutant huntingtin protein exon 1 containing 43 CAG repeats in Huntington disease patient-derived fibroblast cells. Similar results were obtained for a PepMLM-predicted peptide binder of MESH1, a protein controlling ferroptosis, in collaboration with Ashley Chi Jen-Tsan’s group at Duke University (RFDiffusion again gave no hits). And with Madelaine Dumas and Hector Aguilar-Carreno’s group, in collaboration with Matt Delisa’s group at Cornell University, PepMLM-derived peptides bound and reduced levels of viral phosphoproteins from Nipah, Hendra, and human metapneumovirus (HMPV); indeed, in live HMPV infection models, the PepMLM peptide mediated high levels of P protein clearance.
The ability of PepMLM to design binders purely on the basis of target-protein sequence is an important advance towards designing therapeutic peptides against hitherto inaccessible targets that lack structural data. Future work should explore how to incorporate chemical modifications such as cyclization or stapling to enhance stability of the binders, as well as the evaluation of the strongest candidates in vivo. Another challenge will be to ameliorate the immunogenicity of these foreign de novo proteins. The use of protein engineering approaches, such as incorporation of mirror amino acids that can cloak foreign peptides from the immune system, may offer solutions. But it is likely that candidates discovered using sequence or structure prediction tools will still require lengthy development programs to be turned into safe and effective drugs, despite the hype.
A global manufacturing company operates across a wide range of industries, including analytical, medical, and industrial equipment. In recent years, the firm has placed a strong focus on healthcare, particularly in clinical diagnostics and biomanufacturing.
A few years ago, the firm established a corporate venture capital (CVC) division to seek strategic partnerships with companies that possess cutting-edge technologies aligned with its business areas.
The firm has invested in companies across the U.S., Canada, and Asia and is actively looking to expand its portfolio. While the CVC primarily targets investments in Seed to Series A rounds, it may also consider Series B opportunities. Typical check sizes range from $1 million to $5 million USD, though larger investments are possible for particularly promising technologies.
Within healthcare, the firm is seeking opportunities in clinical diagnostics, medical devices, and biomanufacturing. The firm is open to not only hardware but also consumables and software solutions.
To attract investment from the CVC, having a lead investor is desirable.
If you are interested in more information about this investor and other investors tracked by LSN, please email salescore@lifesciencenation.com.
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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