Having closed a nine-figure fundraising round, a newly launched biotechnology company hopes to rewire the immune system with drugs aimed at a special kind of nerve cell.
Nilo Therapeutics debuted Wednesday, equipped with $101 million from a Series A financing that was co-led by the venture capital firms DCVC Bio, Lux Capital and The Column Group. Alexandria Venture Investments and the Gates Foundation also contributed to the round.
The fresh money, according to Nilo, will go toward growing the biotech’s research and development team, advancing its preclinical drug programs, and establishing laboratories in New York City. Nilo formed through a collaboration between The Column Group and three Ivy League scientists — Charles Zuker, of Columbia University; Ruslan Medzhitov, of Yale University; and Stephen Liberles, of Harvard University.
Last year, the journal Nature published research out of Zuker’s lab, which identified a “body-brain” circuit that helps control the immune system. Specifically, researchers found they could dial inflammation up and down in mice by tampering with a part of the brainstem connected to what’s known as the “vagus nerve.” This nerve is the longest in the body, stretching from the head to the abdomen and relaying signals from the brain to other organs like the heart, lungs, liver and stomach.
Nilo is now using these findings as the foundation for its development plans, with the goal of crafting medicines that stabilize the immune system. The company claims that targeting these neural circuits has the potential to adjust multiple immune pathways at once, reduce the risk of drug resistance, and address a “wide spectrum” of autoimmune and inflammatory diseases that very much need new therapies.
The Nilo team aims to “deliver a new generation of therapies that harness the brain-immune axis to transform the treatment of autoimmune and inflammatory conditions,” said Kim Seth, Nilo’s newly appointed CEO, in a statement.
Seth has worked in the biopharmaceutical industry for more than two and a half decades, mostly in business development and director roles. He served as chief business officer at the precision oncology company Repare Therapeutics, which, during Seth’s tenure, inked partnerships or rights agreements with Roche and Bristol Myers Squibb.
Helming Nilo alongside Seth is Chief Scientific Officer Laurens Kruidenier, an immunology specialist who held the same positions at Cellarity and Prometheus Biosciences.
“Nilo is at a transformative moment,” Kruidenier said in the Wednesday statement, and Kim’s leadership and experience will “accelerate our mission.”
The biotech’s launch is another nod of confidence in Zuker from prominent life sciences investors. Almost 10 years ago, a different Zuker-founded company called Kallyope launched with $44 million from an initial group of backers that included Lux and The Column Group. Kallyope’s research focused on the “gut-brain axis.”
