Apollo Health Ventures is unveiling a new start-up: Nula Therapeutics, whose funding comes mostly from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), even as the agency’s budget is under threat.
ARPA-H has promised up to $20 million across up-front and milestone payments to Nula through its PROactive Solutions for Prolonging Resilience (PROSPR) program. Nula is among seven PROSPR awardees, which will use the funds to develop drugs for cancer or disease progression.
Nula’s play is broad: the start-up intends to make small molecules that ultimately lengthen a person’s healthspan—a buzzy term referring to the time period in which one is generally healthy—starting with liver disease. To do this, the company is focused on the nuclear envelope of the cell, which separates the nucleus from the cytoplasm.
“The nuclear envelope of the cell represents a fundamentally new approach to chronic disease and age-related disease that we’re excited about,” CEO Christopher Shepard tells C&EN. “The nuclear envelope for decades was really thought to be this passive membrane around our genetic material that just aggregated in front of the rest of the cell and protected the DNA. It’s really only in the past 10 or 15 years that people came to appreciate how important the nuclear envelope is to gene regulation.”
In addition to having the ability to turn certain genes on or off, the nuclear envelope degrades over time, becoming “dysfunctional” as people age or experience metabolic stress, Shepard says. That could make it an important target for future programs in neurodegenerative diseases and metabolic diseases.
Nula’s lead drug candidate is a molecule called NLT-101, a compound based on 17α-estradiol, that targets a cell’s nuclear envelope. Shepard says that his team was inspired by findings from the National Institute on Aging that 17α-estradiol could extend the lifespan of male mice. Nula intends to launch a study toward the end of this year testing NLT-101’s ability to treat steatotic liver disease.
“What we know is that the nuclear envelope is part of the pathology for many of these organ systems,” Shepard says. “We are taking what I would call a traditional drug development approach in that we have a very select target, we have biomarkers for that target, and we are going for a disease that is most compelling given the data package we have.”
Nula has 14 employees to start out. The start-up is currently in the process of moving to New York City. In addition to the $20 million ARPA-H award, Nula has about $10 million in funding from Apollo Health Ventures. Shepard expects that the funds will provide enough runway to get the firm through 2027 and an initial data readout from the steatotic-liver-disease trial.
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