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The Colorado BioScience Association has announced the companies selected to present at the Rocky Mountain Life Sciences Investor and Partnering Conference in Breckenridge on September 12 and 13. Companies at the conference represent the future of life-saving health innovation from the Rocky Mountain West. They will pitch to angel investors, venture capitalists and strategic partners from major financial hubs.

CU Boulder Startups

Think Bioscience

Think Bioscience is reimagining synthetic biology by using living systems to guide the design and assembly of better medicines. The unique approach to drug discovery combines applied microbiology, enzymology and computational science to develop small-molecule therapeutics against elusive targets. The company recently raised $17 million in an oversubscribed Seed round to expand its drug discovery platform and advance its internal drug development programs.

Arpeggio Biosciences

Arpeggio makes more effective and safer medicine by designing molecules to target not a single protein but the entire cellular network. Their AI and chemotranscriptomic dataset rivals those at Recursion & Novartis, resulting in an NRF2 degrader with rapid regression of KEAP1-mutant tumors in animals and an ACSL4 inhibitor that prevents oxidative stress in mouse kidney disease. Having raised a $17 million series A from Khosla Ventures and Builders VC, we are well-positioned to bring new medicine to patients who desperately need it. 

Aspero Medical

Aspero Medical is focused on improving gastrointestinal endoscopy for the patient and physician. Their differentiated products improve endoscopy while providing financial incentives for providers, improving patient outcomes and reducing the total cost of care. Their first product, the patented and FDA-cleared Ancora-SB, allows endoscopists to go further, faster, during small bowel enteroscopy, offering better diagnostic procedure stability and integration with existing procedure workflow. Their second product, Ancora-LB, aims to revolutionize third-space endoscopy with simple, practical devices that create greater access, stabilization and retraction with exceptional ease of use for the advanced intervention of pre-cancerous and cancerous tissues in the large bowel. Aspero is a capital-efficient medical device company, having secured over $6 million in non-dilutive grant funding, offering asymmetric upside for investors with early exit acquisition potential.

Darwin Biosciences

The COVID-19 pandemic spawned a diagnostics revolution. At-home testing is widely accessible; the layperson understands the difference between qPCR and antigen tests, and preventative measures to limit transmission are commonplace. Unfortunately, an overwhelming number of tests in the market confuse decision-making. What should I test for? What does a positive result from this test mean? When should I test? And at the crux of it all, no test answers the most important question—am I contagious? Darwin has discovered RNA signals in saliva that predict infection by any pathogen. Additionally, the signals correlate to the amount of actively replicating pathogens, and they believe this is an indicator of contagiousness. They have developed a portable RNA amplification device to detect this signature, providing an easy paper strip readout. Darwin’s technology simplifies infectious disease diagnostics by providing one test capable of broad-spectrum detection.

Illumen Therapeutics

Illumen Therapeutics is pursuing a cancer treatment moonshot, developing PARN Inhibitor drugs to increase functional p53, the 'Guardian of the Genome,' to treat aggressive cancers. Dysregulation of p53, a tumor suppressor protein, is the hallmark of nearly all cancers. Drugging p53 has been considered the Holy Grail of cancer drug development. The company is the first to pursue this novel, promising therapeutic strategy of inhibiting PARN to increase functional p53 to treat wild-type p53 aggressive cancers. They are at the hit-to-lead stage of drug discovery. PARN as a target and the therapeutic strategy of inhibiting PARN was discovered by Roy Parker and his lab at the BioFrontiers Institute.

TissueForm

TissueForm aims to improve life for people affected by joint cartilage disease or damage by harnessing the natural, restorative power of tissue extracellular matrix. TissueForm’s biomaterial immediately fills defects, integrates with host tissue, provides a robust structural scaffold, and promotes long-term tissue growth and healing. Currently, limited cartilage repair methods are suitable to repair tissue following local trauma and halt or prevent progress toward a serious degenerative joint disease known as osteoarthritis (OA). Orthopedic surgeons do not have any simple and cost-effective materials to offer patients with cartilage damage to stop the progression of knee degradation toward OA. TissueForm’s acellular matrix-based cartilage solution, NatruLage, is flowable for easy delivery, immediately restores cartilage structure under loading and is able customize to a wide variety of lesion shapes and sizes to repair the tissue damage and decrease pain for patients.