When 3 world-class scientists from Columbia, Yale & Harvard link up with some of biotech’s sharpest VCs, it’s not just another company launch, it’s a signal flare over Manhattan. Nilo Therapeutics just came out of stealth with a $101M Series A, powered by The Column Group, DCVC Bio & Lux Capital, joined by the Gates Foundation & Alexandria Venture Investments. That’s not a lineup, it’s a declaration.
Nilo isn’t tinkering around the edges of medicine. They’re building an entirely new way to treat immune disorders by going upstream, to the brain. Think about that for a second. Instead of shutting the immune system down like traditional drugs, Nilo is tapping the neural “master regulators” that tell the body how to balance inflammation in the first place. It’s neuroimmunology in motion, a direct line from neurons to immunity.
Behind this launch sits a scientific dream team: Dr. Charles Zuker of Columbia University (HHMI Investigator), Dr. Ruslan Medzhitov of Yale, & Dr. Steve Liberles of Harvard. These are the kind of names that make other researchers stop scrolling. Their discovery, that specific vagal neurons can modulate systemic inflammation, shifted the conversation from “How do we suppress immunity?” to “How do we restore balance?” Now, that insight is going commercial.
At the operational wheel is Dr. Kim Seth, CEO of Nilo Therapeutics, who brought business precision from Repare Therapeutics, Pfizer & Goldman Sachs, and scientific depth with a Harvard Ph.D. in Neurobiology. Alongside him is Dr. Laurens Kruidenier, CSO, who’s been in the trenches at Cellarity & Prometheus Biosciences, translating complex biology into drug reality. Together, they’re not chasing trends, they’re building the next blueprint for immune health.
With $101M now fueling the mission, Nilo’s planting its roots deep in NYC. The plan: stand up new labs, recruit an elite cross-disciplinary team & push multiple preclinical programs toward IND studies. The company’s tech dives into the brain-immune axis, with neural-circuit modulators that could outperform today’s immunosuppressants by hitting the true upstream regulators of inflammation.
The autoimmune & inflammatory disease markets are massive, multi-billion-dollar, global, underserved. But what makes Nilo worth watching isn’t the market size; it’s the method. This is precision modulation at the source. No noise, no overkill, just smart science rewriting what “immune therapy” even means.
When the brain starts treating the body, the game changes. And Nilo just made the first move.
