About Us
Heart Failure is one of humanity's biggest problems. It is the largest cause of death in the US and the world. In the US it is responsible for killing roughly half a million people per year - that is 3x more than the deadliest cancer and 10x more than auto-accidents. 25% of the population will suffer from this condition in their lifetime and it is a major reason for the plateau in the growth of human lifespan. Our mission is to cure this disease.
We are taking a first principles approach to cure chronic heart failure (HF), starting with a focus on late stage ischemic heart failure (the leading form of HF), we are building out a platform that most predictively recapitulates the human disease. This platform will be composed of a set of calibrated in-vitro & in-vivo assays that will help us rapidly and accurately predict the efficacy and safety of drug candidates for this disease, allowing us to iterate and optimize our therapies before running clinical trials.
The first hypothesis that we will be testing out in our platform is cardiac regeneration, to add contractility back to the diseased heart. This hypothesis has been demonstrated by many different academic institutes, of which 7 have compelling data in large animal studies using distinct approaches. We will use this as a starting point of our iteration & optimization loop. Over time, we will be able to leverage our platform to rapidly test out other hypotheses for this and other cardiac indications.
Our first therapy will be for patients in late stage ischemic heart failure. Given the lack of alternatives for the late stage HF population (100k patients in the US, very costly to our health systems), providers & patients are incredibly enthusiastic for new therapeutic interventions. Over time, we plan to open up to earlier stage HF patients, and think we could help as many as 1m patients in the US, 3.5m worldwide.
If we are able to build a curative therapy, we believe we can go beyond the current standard of care in heart failure and have a transformative impact in patient lives.
Our Team
We are early in our journey and have been very selectively bringing on people on a full time/consulting basis.
Justin Olshavsky
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Founded Voyage Bio, built through acquisition by Penumbra (NYSE:PEN), former bio-focused venture GP at Pioneer
Apoorva Mehta
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Founder and CEO of Instacart (NASDAQ:CART), took company from $0 to $30B in sales and successful IPO
Carlos Del Rio PhD
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Head of Translational at Myokardia (acq by BMS for $13.1B), Executive Director of Cardiovascular at Moderna
Patrick Fortuna PhD
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Cardiac regeneration / iPSC expert from George Church lab
Strategic Advisors
Sek Kathiresan MD
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CEO and Founder of Verve Therapeutics (NASDAQ: VERV)
Eric Green MD, PhD
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CEO and Founder of Trace Neuroscience, CSO and Founder of Maze Tx (NASDAQ: MAZE), Head of Translational at Myokardia (acq. by BMS, $13B)
Scientific Advisors
Deepak Srivastava MD - Publications
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President of Gladstone Institute & Senior Investigator in CV Disease. Pioneer in cardiac regeneration
Mauro Giacca MD, PhD - Publications
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Professor of CV Sciences at KCL, pioneer in cardiac regeneration
Clinical Advisors
Dan Burkhoff MD, PhD - Publications
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Leading HF science & tech research, helped build the most innovative products in HF in last 20 years (Impella, Valves, VADs)
Marc Semigran MD - Publications
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CMO at Myokardia (acq. by BMS, $13B), CDO at Edgewise (NASDAQ:EWTX), CMO at Renovacor (acq. by Rocket)
AI Advisors
Patrick Hsu, PhD - Publications
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Founder of Arc Institute, Professor of BioE at UC Berkeley
Chris Gibson, PhD - Publications
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CEO and Founder of Recursion (NASDQ:RXRX)
Open Positions
In Vitro Biologist - Cardiac Focus
RNA Biologist
Cardiac Regenerative Biologist
In Vivo Biologist - Large Animal Cardiac Focus
BioInformatics / AI
Our Investors
We have raised $92m in seed round from leading biotech/tech investors such as Eclipse, Dimension Cap, Neil Mehta, Lachy Groom, Patrick and John Collision, Blake Byers, Chris Gibson, Elad Gil and others.