KdT Ventures

As a father, husband, son, and scientist I dream of a world where no neurological disease is beyond our reach, where we don't shy away from targets because they seem too risky. A world where every neurological disease, no matter how tough, is druggable. Today, with the unveiling of Montara Therapeutics, Inc., I hope to contribute to making that dream a reality.  At my previous company, Mitokinin, we worked for nearly a decade to develop a potential disease-modifying treatment for Parkinson's disease. During that process, I learned how difficult it is to generate safe and effective drugs for many of the neurological diseases that millions suffer from worldwide. After Mitokinin was acquired last fall, I knew that I wanted to start a new company to address some of the other tough-to-drug neurological indications, including Alzheimer's disease, brain cancers, and neuropsychiatric indications. When Kevan Shokat, who was my Ph.D. supervisor University of California, San Francisco and scientific co-founder of Mitokinin, came to me with new research from his lab suggesting a pharmacological mechanism to block drugs from working in the periphery, thereby mitigating their adverse side effects, I immediately recognized the impact this could have, not for the treatment of just one or two diseases, but across nearly all neurodegenerative and neurological diseases and brain cancer.  Together, with the help of our other scientific co-founders, Martin Kampmann and Thomas Südhof, a highly experienced team of advisors, as well as nine stellar employees from Mitokinin, we formed Montara Therapeutics to progress this groundbreaking research from bench to bedside, developing safer and more efficacious treatments for various diseases of the brain. Today, we’re thrilled to announce the funding of our seed round. With support from top-tier investors, including SV Dementia Discovery Fund (DDF), Two Bear Capital, KdT Ventures, and Dolby Family Ventures, I believe we have the right ingredients to accomplish our mission, and I’m very excited for what the future has in store for Montara, but most importantly, for patients We look forward to sharing more details in the months to come. Follow Montara Therapeutics, Inc. to stay updated on our progress. Thanks to Amber Tong and Endpoints News for the exclusive!

Like this song did 13 years ago, ZymoChem just dropped the BAYSE. https://lnkd.in/ezWHTNX7

new pod!

the 2024 edition of the Decoding Bio report is live! we analyzed many of the most impactful recent papers in AI, biosecurity, cell-based medicines, immunology, and biotech software. from the jump, a core goal of Decoding Bio has been to clearly communicate why these developments matter, why you should care, and what key challenges remain. hopefully our analysis helps make sense of the dizzying pace of progress in these fields. if not, at least enjoy the brilliant design work by Bunsen. full report: https://lnkd.in/eYbB_Jch

Thanks to Stephen Zachary and Sands Capital for hosting and to Zeshan Muhammedi Justin Yang Patrick Malone, MD PhD Alec Stapp for organizing our biomanufacturing roundtable MC’d by Jassi Pannu! Institute for Progress (IFP) KdT Ventures MBX Capital Global Health Investment Corporation Cooley LLP

new pod!

ELEGEN today announces its first partnership with GSK- $35M to start with more to come. Cell-free, clonal, scaled (1G+)DNA manufactured in 7 days or less is the only way we enable personalized genetic medicine- and I can confidently say only ELEGEN can do this. The recent Moderna Lancet publication on their Phase II personalized Melanoma Vaccine (20 unique antigens per patient)last week said it best: "Logistical complexity is intrinsic to personalized neoepitope selection and manufacture...future development must continue to optimize methods to facilitate timely manufacturing." Sure we all know that timely manufacturing is key, but get this. The paper also mentioned in the discussion that the " delayed separation <of the two trial arms> might be partly attributable to the manufacturing time of mRNA-4157". ELEGEN will save time, money, and lives. Best kind of investment. Only frustrating part is seeing so many inferior technologies get gobs of funding based on hype. Customers see the power here, and GSK will be the first of many. #personalizedmedicine #dna #mrna #mrnavaccines

Terray Therapeutics powers forward, with our announcement of the NVIDIA strategic investment. KdT Ventures continues to believe that without high quality scaled data, ML/AI does not work in science. Very few have a <real> dataset as dense and scalable as Terray- though many pitch they do, substituting in silico data (trained on what?) to pull a fast one on naive investors. Proud to have continued our participation since the seed round in a company we believe will seismically change the landscape of small molecule development.

the founding thesis of Terray Therapeutics was that the biggest bottleneck in AI-driven drug discovery is a paucity of high-quality data at scale. five years in, Terray has built an end-to-end platform that integrates automated chemical experimentation and generative AI, all purpose-built with the end (generating safe, effective, drug-like small molecules) in mind. excited to announce a collaboration and investment in Terray from NVentures, NVIDIA's venture arm. Terray and NVIDIA will collaborate on completing SOTA chemistry foundation models, some of which will be made available on NVIDIA's BioNeMo platform for AI in drug discovery. by open-sourcing some of Terray's models, the drug discovery community will see what we see: the "unreasonable effectiveness" of high-quality experimental data in solving complex problems in drug discovery. full press release: https://lnkd.in/e-GkiUCd Eli Berlin Jacob Berlin, PhD Narbe Mardirossian

On to the next leg of the journey at Debut ! Pumped to partner with L'Oréal as we move into a proven synthetic biology business model without the technical and monetary debt of past attempts. Game time!