NextGen: Class of 2025

Launched: June 21, 2023

Location: Cambridge, MA  

Fundraising: $23M seed + $90M series A

Notable: ARTBIO is taking a new, artful approach to radioligand therapies amid a frenzy of pharma interest.

Differentiator: Rather than going after the more common beta isotope that’s used in currently approved therapies, the biotech is developing alpha radioligand therapies (ART). As Big Pharmas strike deal after deal in the radiopharma space, we expect ARTBIO’s unique approach will catch some eyes.

In December 2023, ARTBIO announced a $90 million series A to hunt for new radiopharmaceuticals. In May, the company teamed up with FogPharma, which itself raised $145 million in March 2024 in a rare series E round. 

ARTBIO’s lead asset is AB001 for prostate cancer, which is currently in early-stage human testing.

One More Thing: ARTBIO has been actively shoring up manufacturing capacity for its future products, signing two clinical supply deals in 2024.

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Launched: 2013

Location: Skokie, IL

Fundraising: $30M initial round + $105M series A

Notable: It’s been a slow burn for COUR Pharmaceuticals, but things are heating up. The company was created back in 2013 but fundraisings have come just twice: a $30 million initial round in September 2022 and a $105 million raise in January 2024.

Differentiator: COUR’s proprietary antigen-specific immune tolerance platform designs treatments that reprogram the immune system to address the underlying root causes of immune-mediated disease.

The company has gone through quite a few changes, initially focusing on therapies for primary biliary cholangitis (PBC) and peanut allergy. It now has a slimmer pipeline, with the PBC therapy front and center in Phase II testing but the peanut allergy med is nowhere to be found. COUR’s other most advanced program is CNP-106 for myasthenia gravis.

One More Thing: Roche signed a $40 million upfront licensing deal with COUR in December 2024 that could be worth up to $900 million down the line in milestones. COUR also has a long-standing deal with Takeda to work on a celiac disease candidate called CNP-101/TAK-101, which is in Phase II testing.

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Launched: April 3, 2024

Location: Cambridge, MA

Fundraising: $128M series A

Notable: Diagonal is developing antibodies for rare diseases, starting with a lead asset going after the bleeding disorder hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT). The condition can lead to brain hemorrhage, stroke, heart failure and death.

Differentiator: Instead of inhibiting cellular function like currently approved antibodies, Diagonal’s agonist antibodies activate a broken signaling cascade in the cells to go after the underlying cause of disease.

Besides HHT, Diagonal has another program for pulmonary arterial hypertension and an unnamed target in the discovery phase for genetically defined vasculopathy. The company has been doing the rounds at scientific conferences this fall raising the profile of HHT.

One More Thing: The company was seeded in part by CEO Alexey Lugovskoy, who was previously chief operating officer at Dragonfly Therapeutics and did drug discovery at Biogen.  

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Launched: February 15, 2024

Location: South San Francisco, CA

Fundraising: $94 million series A

Notable: What happens when you mix antibody-drug conjugates with protein degraders, and add in a Nobel Prize-winning scientist? You get Firefly Bio, which was co-founded by Carolyn Bertozzi.

Differentiator: Firefly is combining ADCs with protein degraders to create new therapies called degrader antibody conjugates that can overcome the limitations of those treatments on their own. The biotech is developing a new class of therapeutics that can precisely reach targets with minimal off-target effects.

The company is still in its early stages and has only said its approach could be a new modality for cancer. But at launch, Versant Ventures Managing Director Jerel Davis also hinted at immunology as a potential target.

One More Thing: Firefly was incubated at Versant Ventures’ Ridgeline Discovery Engine in Switzerland and counts Eli Lilly as an early investor.

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Launched: August 16, 2024

Location: Palo Alto, CA

Fundraising: $300M

Notable: GondolaBio spun out of BridgeBio in August with $300 million in funding and a handful of assets for genetic and rare diseases. It’s a unique start for a biotech on this list, but the new company joins a handful of BridgeBio offshoots including KRAS-focused cancer biotech BridgeBio Oncology Therapeutics.

Differentiator: GondolaBio will focus on three rare conditions: tuberous sclerosis complex, erythropoietic protoporphyria and alpha-A1 antitrypsin deficiency. All of the assets come from BridgeBio’s stockroom.

The funding was supported by investors including Viking Global Investors, Patient Square Capital, Sequioa Capital, Frazier Life Sciences, Cormorant Asset Management and Aisling Capital.

One More Thing: BridgeBio will remain a significant shareholder with a 45% initial holding.

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Launched: February 14, 2024

Location: Thousand Oaks, CA 

Fundraising: $135M series A

Notable: When Westlake Village BioPartners went looking for a pain company to invest in, few were to be found—until Amgen moved out of pain, that is. Then, the venture capital firm was able to swoop in and catch the experts, bringing them into a new biotech.

Differentiator: Latigo’s lead program LTG-001 is a NaV1.8 inhibitor that has shown potential for rapid onset and aims to target pain at the source. The NaV1.8 pathway has been shown to play a crucial role in the transmission of pain signals in the body. By inhibiting it, LTG-001 could relieve pain while bypassing the central nervous system—which is the source of addiction and other side effects associated with some pain meds.

A Phase I trial of LTG-001 just began dosing healthy volunteers in October 2024, with Latigo expecting topline results in mid-2025.

One More Thing: Latigo will go up against Vertex Pharmaceuticals, the only major player with advanced non-opioid pain candidates in the works. Its NaV1.8 inhibitor suzetrigine was submitted to the FDA earlier this year.

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Launched: June 18, 2024

Location: San Francisco, CA 

Fundraising: $190M series A and B

Notable: While the metabolic space has seen plenty of excitement of late—see GLP-1s—there’s still a lot of room to improve on the existing treatment paradigm. Enter Marea, which is developing therapies for genetically validated cardiometabolic disease targets.

Differentiator: Using large-scale human genetics, experts in adipose function and biology are addressing as-yet unaddressed drivers of cardiometabolic disease risk. The goal is to find new treatments that can complement existing care strategies for high-risk patients.

Marea has a Phase II asset called MAR001 for cardiometabolic disorders, with strong Phase I data already in hand. The drug inhibits ANGPTL4 to augment lipoprotein lipase activity and hopefully lower remnant cholesterol.

One More Thing: CEO Josh Lehrer previously served in that role at Graphite Bio, which merged into LENZ Therapeutics, and Global Blood Therapeutics, which was acquired by Pfizer in 2022. The latter biotech was behind Oxbryta, which was recently withdrawn by Pfizer.

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Launched: March 21, 2024

Location: San Diego, CA

Fundraising: $400M series A

Notable: Following Prometheus Biosciences’ $10.8 billion acquisition by Merck in 2023, the biotech’s CEO Mark McKenna moved quickly to build a new company. He formed Mirador with several Prometheus colleagues.

Differentiator: You’ve heard about precision medicine for oncology, but how about inflammatory and fibrotic diseases? That’s where Mirador hopes to step away from the pack, by using its development engine called Mirador360 to study millions of patient molecular profiles to find genetic associations to immune-fibrotic diseases and new therapeutic targets.

So far, Mirador has not revealed details of its pipeline. The biotech signed a deal with 23andMe in November to leverage genetic and phenotypic data to validate targets for new precision medicines.

One More Thing: Mirador broke cover with $400 million in financing, which was one of the largest debuts of 2024.

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Launched: April 1, 2021

Location: New York, NY

Fundraising: $25M seed + $100M series A

Notable: OnCusp has been on the scene since April 2021 and has collected about $139 million in funds since then, including a $100 million series A in January 2024.

Differentiator: Few things are bigger in oncology right now than antibody-drug conjugates, which means a new biotech in the space has to stand out. OnCusp hopes to do just that with CUSP06, a drug that is meant to heighten the “bystander effect” to counter drug resistance. The biotech kicked off a Phase I study in March for patients with certain types of advanced ovarian cancer and other solid tumors.

One More Thing: OnCusp is backed by Novo Holdings, the parent company of Novo Nordisk.

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Launched: October 18, 2021

Location: San Diego, CA

Fundraising: $52.5M series A

Notable: Seven months after raising a $52.5 million series A, Radionetics set out its future by granting Eli Lilly the right to acquire it some day. The deal was for $140 million upfront and sets the sale price at $1 billion.

Differentiator: So what does Radionetics do in the meantime? The deal includes an exercise period during which the biotech will continue building out a pipeline of proprietary small molecule radioligand therapeutics that target G protein coupled receptors. The Radionetics platform combines radiopharmaceuticals with the world of small molecule chemistry.

One More Thing: GPCRs is an unexplored target space for radiopharmaceuticals, according to Radionetics. It could help find new treatments for breast, lung and other cancers.

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Launched: August 2024

Location: Cambridge, MA  

Fundraising: $55M series A

Notable: Red Queen emerged in August 2024 with a Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) contract already in hand for a pan-influenza therapeutic.

Differentiator: Viral diseases have gone out of vogue post-pandemic, but that hasn’t stopped Red Queen from setting out to develop new antivirals. The company’s stapled lipopeptide platform technology can quickly design new antivirals and advance them through clinical proof of concept. Besides the influenza treatment, Red Queen’s pipeline includes preclinical programs in COVID-19, herpes and respiratory syncytial virus.

One More Thing: Red Queen was formed in part by Loren Walensky, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, among other accolades.

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Launched: April 2024

Location: Boston, MA

Fundraising: $100M series A + $225 series B

Notable: Seaport was founded by leaders from Karuna Therapeutics, which sold to Bristol Myers Squibb in December 2023 for $14 billion. CEO Daphna Zohar, former CEO of PureTech Health, has founder credits for both biotechs.

Differentiator: Set up by PureTech, an R&D engine that has spawned three FDA-approved drugs, Seaport formed around the Glyph platform that allows small molecule therapeutics to move into the lymphatic system via oral administration. The lead pipeline asset is SPT-300 for major depressive disorder, which is already in Phase II testing.

One More Thing: Six months after breaking cover with a respectable $100 million in series A fundraising, neuropsychiatric biotech Seaport was back in October 2024 with a much larger $225 million oversubscribed series B.

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Launched: January 2024

Location: San Diego, CA

Fundraising: $75M series A

Notable: Tr1X’s cell therapy platform is based on the scientific work of Stanford University’s Maria Grazia Roncarolo, who discovered type 1 regulatory T (Tr1) cells that can be used to develop new treatments for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.

Differentiator: Tr1X (pronounced Trix) is working on allogeneic engineered Treg and CAR-Treg therapies from universal donors designed to return function to naturally occurring Tr1 cells. The regulatory T cell–based therapeutics are designed to mimic naturally occurring Tr1 cells to restore immune tolerance.

Tr1X’s engineered Tr1 Treg cell therapy TRX103 was cleared by the FDA for a clinical trial in Crohn’s disease in August. The therapy is already in a Phase I/IIa trial for prevention of graft versus host disease in patients undergoing hematopoietic stem cell transplant for blood cancer.

One More Thing: Roncarolo was involved in the development of two early gene therapies, Strimvelis for adenosine deaminase deficiency and Orchard Therapeutics’ Libmeldy for the rare metabolic disorder metachromatic leukodystrophy. Strimvelis is also owned by Orchard after being developed by GSK.

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Launched: June 25, 2024

Location: Boston, MA

Fundraising: $82M series A

Notable: Tal Zaks served as chair and interim CEO. You may know him from a little biotech called Moderna, where he served as chief medical officer during the pandemic. Zaks was replaced as CEO by Tom Barnes in Jan. 2025.

Differentiator: Gene therapy is a tough space, but Averna is hoping to avoid the pitfalls of its peers by using mRNA to insert whole new genes into a cell. This could enable repeat dosing.

Averna, then known as Exsilio Therapeutics, planned to use the series A, which was backed by Novartis Venture Fund, to build out its genetic medicines pipeline. No candidates have been named as of yet, but the company said at launch that its approach could be applied to genetic diseases, cancer and autoimmune conditions.

One More Thing: Averna’s manufacturing process should yield cost savings on typical gene therapy, using smaller containers for production over a shorter timeframe than biologics, Zaks told BioSpace earlier this year.

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Launched: March 20, 2024

Location: Rockville, MD, and Cambridge, MA

Fundraising: $150M series A

Notable: Born out of Johns Hopkins from famed geneticist Bert Vogelstein and immuno-oncology pioneer Drew Pardoll, Clasp is a next-gen immune-oncology company.

Differentiator: Is it possible to wander the store shelves and find something just for you? That’s the future of oncology treatment that Clasp Therapeutics envisions. The company is developing off-the-shelf T cell engagers that are personalized to a patient’s human leukocyte antigen (HLA) type. Typically, T cell engagers link to proteins on the surface of the cell, which can cause off-target effects, but Clasp’s approach goes after proteins inside the cancer cell by grabbing onto peptides that are displayed by HLA molecules, bringing the T cell in contact with the tumor cell and triggering a destructive immune response.

It’s still early days for Clasp’s pipeline but the company has been showcasing preclinical data on the fall conference circuit, specifically for CLSP-1025, which is under investigation for solid tumors.

One More Thing: Clasp is backed by Novo Holdings, the parent company of Novo Nordisk.

More on Clasp

Launched: May 2024

Location: Cambridge, MA  

Fundraising: $67M series A

Notable: Delphia’s founders include Bill Sellers of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Mike Dillon, who previously served at IDEAYA Biosciences and the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research. The pair are behind more than 15 approved drugs.

Differentiator: “Activation lethality” sounds straight out of a spy novel, but it’s actually the name of Delphia Therapeutics’ cancer killing science. Instead of inhibiting the growth of cancers, the biotech’s platform aims to force the cancer cells to overactivate, overloading cell stress pathways and spurring cell death. This could prevent resistance.

Delphia has yet to detail its pipeline but has hinted at developing candidates that can address resistance to “classic targeted therapies.”

One More Thing: Delphia finds its targets through the study of tumor genetics, genomic approaches and inhibitor drug resistance.

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Launched: September 19, 2024

Location: Cambridge, MA

Fundraising: $65M series A

Notable: George Church has launched his personal biotech—with his initials right in the name.

Differentiator: GC is developing off-the-shelf induced pluripotent stem cell therapies using synthetic biology, gene editing, cell engineering and machine learning. Its initial pipeline will focus on gastrointestinal, neurological and immunological diseases, pushing beyond oncology and immunology.

The famed scientist started the biotech in an attempt to overcome some of the early scalability challenges that have plagued cell therapies and made treatments hard—and expensive—for patients to access.

One More Thing: CEO Parastoo Khoshakhlagh is an alumnis of Church’s Lab at Harvard Medical School. One of the serial entrepreneur’s previous biotechs, Tympanogen, created a hydrogel patch for treating ear drum ruptures that went to space aboard the SpaceX Dragon Cargo Ship.

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Launched: 2022

Location: San Diego, CA 

Fundraising: $82M series A

Notable: Kenai expects its lead Parkinson’s disease cell therapy, which has funding from the Michael J. Fox Foundation, to enter Phase I trials this year.

Differentiator: Kenai is using induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) technology to find new treatments for neurodegenerative diseases. Using off-the-shelf dopamine neuron replacement cell therapies to try to replace neurons that have degenerated, the company aims toreverse disease progression in certain forms of Parkinson’s and other central nervous conditions.

One More Thing: Kenai was previously known as Ryne Bio and received a $4 million grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to support the development of RNDP-001.

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Launched: May 2, 2024

Location: Philadelphia, PA 

Fundraising: $54M series A

Notable: Latus Bio originated from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) to develop new gene therapies for central nervous system disorders.

Differentiator: While AAV gene therapy is not new, Latus is taking a new approach by screening novel AAV capsids in non-human primates, with the aim of avoiding off-target effects, high dosages and scalability challenges. Latus hopes to enter its first candidate into the clinic in 2025, with programs in Huntington’s disease and CLN2 disease.

One More Thing: The biotech is based on science from the lab of professor Beverly Davidson, who is the chief scientific officer of CHOP and the co-founder of Spark Therapeutics, which was acquired by Roche for $4.3 billion in February 2019. Spark was the first to receive the FDA’s greenlight on a gene therapy for a genetic disease, with Luxturna earning approval for an inherited retinal disease in 2017.

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Launched: April 18, 2024

Location: New York, NY

Fundraising: $290M series A + $215M series B

Notable: No biotech has made as big a splash as Metsera this year. The biotech launched in April and has already posted potentially practice-changing data for the GLP-1 weight loss space, not to mention another nine-digit round of funding.

Differentiator: Metsera’s Phase I long-acting GLP-1 drug MET-097 made waves in September with data showing a 7.5% reduction in body weight at day 36. The biotech said this result was as good or better than approved products from Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. And notably, the trial was conducted without titration, where a patient slowing ramps up to the correct dose. The competing therapies must be ramped up slowly to ease gastrointestinal side effects. A Phase IIb is set to kick off in the first half of 2025.

One More Thing: After releasing the data in September, Metsera quickly turned the success into some cash, raising another $215 million in November 2024. Metsera is also planning for future manufacturing, signing a deal with Amneal Pharmaceuticals in October to supply its novel injectable and oral GLP-1 and amylin receptor agonists.

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Launched: April 9, 2024

Location: Cambridge, MA

Fundraising: $100M series A + $75M in other financing

Notable: We picked Nvelop as one of our NextGen companies earlier this fall. On December 11, the biotech announced it would join forces with Chroma Medicine to form nChroma Bio. The combined company is attempting a “functional cure” for chronic hepatitis.

Differentiator: In the tough space of genetic medicines, sometimes working together can produce the best result. That’s what nChroma Bio hopes to do, pairing two biotechs to create one company encompassing epigenetic editing and next-generation in vivo delivery technologies.

The main asset for the newly combined company is CRMA-100, a liver-targeted epigenetic editing therapy for chronic hepatitis B and hepatitis D. nChroma Bio plans to submit an application for human testing this year.

One More Thing: Nvelop was originally spun out of research from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

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Launched: November 7, 2023

Location: Palo Alto, CA

Fundraising: $60M series A + $67M series B

Notable: Eli Lilly has participated in OrsoBio’s fundraising, getting involved in a new metabolic biotech from the jump.

Differentiator: OrsoBio is trying to fix a big problem with GLP-1s: lean muscle loss and the reduction of energy expenditure. The biotech is developing mitochondrial protonophores that could be paired with existing GLP-1 agonists to improve the quality of weight loss experienced with the medicines. The lead candidate is TLC-6740, an oral therapy that’s already in Phase Ib testing for patients with obesity.

One More Thing: Early evidence suggests that mitochondrial protonophores could boost weight loss experienced with the GLP-1s, too.

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Launched: October 2023

Location: Monrovia, CA

Fundraising: $85M Series A

Notable: Rampart is developing treatments for genetic diseases with an eye towards keeping costs down.

Differentiator: The HALO platform uses “cues from nature” to address durability and potency limitations and safety concerns of first-generation non-viral gene therapies. The aim is to make treatments that are safe and redosable.

Rampart’s lead program is in hypophosphatasia, a rare, often fatal genetic disease that prevents bone mineralization.

One More Thing: CEO Louis Breton previously served as the chief executive of Calimmune, which was acquired by CSL Bering for $416 million in 2017. Chief Innovation and Technical Officer Jeffrey Bartlett is also a Calimmune alum, most recently serving at CSL Bering as senior director of gene therapy strategic development.

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Launched: 2008

Location: Morristown, NJ

Fundraising: $103M series A

Notable: Novo Holdings co-led Reunion’s series A in May 2024, providing a huge Big Pharma–adjacent backer and a boost of credibility in a space that has had some high profile failures of late.

Differentiator: Being in the psychedelics space is not for the faint of heart after the failure of Lykos Therapeutics to gain an FDA nod for a new MDMA treatment earlier this year. But Reunion Neuroscience is doing things differently, developing a short-duration psychedelic compound that cuts down the time of the effect compared to psilocybin and MDMA. RE104, which is in Phase II testing for postpartum depression, can be administered in just half a day under the supervision of a healthcare professional.

One More Thing: Reunion used to be a public company but was brought private again in a transaction with biotech investment firm MPM BioImpact. The company was launched in 2008 as Field Trip Health but reorganized as Reunion in August 2022.

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Launched: December 2023

Location: South San Francisco, CA, and Kyoto, Japan

Fundraising: $51M series A

Notable: CAR T pioneer Carl June sits on Shinobi’s scientific advisory board.

Differentiator: Shinobi is developing off-the-shelf cell therapies that evade the immune system, working with rather than against the body to prevent rejection of donor-derived therapies. The biotech plans to take its cell therapies, created using the Katana iPS-T cell therapy platform, beyond blood cancers and into solid tumors, regenerative medicine and autoimmune disease—the latter of which has been a defining trend of the cell therapy scene in 2024.

One More Thing: June suggested that Shinobi’s approach could make CAR T cell therapies more accessible to patients on a global scale, according to a statement when the biotech launched.

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