A developmental biologist by training, Anne Eichmann never thought about creating a drug or starting a company early in her career.
“I was drawn to science just for the fun of understanding how things work,” said Eichmann, the Ensign Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine) and professor of cellular and molecular physiology at Yale School of Medicine.
But she eventually started to realize science is more than just fun.
“You get to a point where you see that what you discovered could actually be good for humanity going forward,” she said.
That has certainly been the case for Eichmann’s research. Through her lab at Yale, she and her team have discovered a groundbreaking drug delivery technology that has the potential to revolutionize the field of neurology. Called D2B3, the technology temporarily and reversibly opens what is known as the blood brain barrier (BBB). A natural defense mechanism that protects the brain from pathogens and harmful substances, the BBB also prevents potentially life-saving drugs from reaching their target.
“This technology could make a big difference in people’s lives,” Eichmann said. “That is obviously what we all strive to do at the end of the day, and not all of us have the chance to actually be able to do that.”
Eichmann wasn’t able to start translating her work in the lab into the real world until she started working with The Blavatnik Fund for Innovation at Yale, a fund that has helped transform the university’s field-leading research into life-saving solutions across the life sciences since 2017.
Now, with the recent launch of HealthTech Works — which focuses on digital health and medical technology solutions — the Blavatnik Fund is one of five accelerator funds led by Yale Ventures, the university’s hub for innovation and entrepreneurship. Together, the Blavatnik Fund, HealthTech Works, the Colton Center for Autoimmunity at Yale (autoimmune and allergic disease), the Roberts Innovation Fund (engineering), and the Planetary Solutions Impact Accelerator (planetary solutions), support faculty-led ventures looking to transform bold ideas into scalable solutions.
“One of the major goals of the university is to have as large a positive impact on society as we can, and Yale invests well over $1 billion per year in research,” said Josh Geballe, senior associate provost for entrepreneurship and innovation at Yale and managing director of Yale Ventures. “These accelerator funds are designed to help ensure that, from the output of that research, we are launching solutions to many of the big challenges the world is facing in a wide range of domains.”
More than just capital
The five accelerator funds each focus on different innovation domains, but they’re united by a shared goal: the commercialization of Yale faculty research.
“Our research faculty are exceptionally busy,” Geballe said. “They’re among the leading scholars in the world in their domains. But very few of them have a business background or experience launching a startup company before. So, the goal of the accelerators is to provide them both funding and support to navigate the journey from lab to market.”
So, how do the accelerator funds do that? First and foremost, they provide faculty with targeted funding on the path toward commercialization. The amount of money depends on the specific fund. Every year, the funds run a competitive process in which faculty apply and present their proposals.
But the accelerator funds provide more than just capital. Yale faculty also get access to a network of experts — including industry leaders, but also Yale’s own network of executives and investors — as well entrepreneurship training tailored to their specific fields ranging from workshops to asynchronous resources.
“In external accelerators, you’re engaging with the unknown world of entrepreneurs, and you’re getting a new batch of evergreen entrepreneurs from the wild,” said Claudia Reuter, executive director of engineering innovation at Yale Ventures and director of the Roberts Innovation Fund. “Essentially, here at Yale, we’re focused on being customer service oriented toward our faculty. We’re trying to really service the people who are here and ensure they’re getting quality resources and support on the path to commercialization.”
For most faculty members, these supported ventures are the first time they have had to navigate the complex world of entrepreneurship. So, they also get hands-on support from Yale Ventures, which has an experienced team of business and venture development professionals, fellows, and student associates.
“For everyone involved, their ultimate goal is impact,” Geballe said. “It’s to treat and cure diseases. It’s to develop new sources of renewable energy. It’s to build the world’s first scalable quantum computer. The work that we do in these accelerators is all about the path to get there. It’s about how to position these technologies to attract the investment that they need to be developed through clinical trials in the case of therapeutics, or to be scaled up and brought to market in the case of other products and services.”
In addition to spinning out new companies, there’s another goal of the accelerator funds: to strengthen the local economy in New Haven. So for companies that stay local, there are additional benefits in terms of continued collaboration with faculty members as well as access to the resources Yale provides to help them grow further.
“Today most of them stay,” Geballe said. “That’s because of the progress that the city has made, in many cases with Yale’s support, to open incubator sites and to build up the talent density in the region that enables these companies to be successful here.”
Centering Yale faculty
As the university’s newest innovation funds, both HealthTech Works and the Planetary Solutions Impact Accelerator, which is part of the core programming of Yale Planetary Solutions, have yet to disburse their first rounds of awards and funding. But the three older funds have had time to demonstrate their capacity to not only help launch companies but also deliver tangible, real-world outcomes.
“For the large majority of innovative ideas that we see in medicine developed by companies — pharmaceuticals companies, technology companies, companies that make devices, biotech startups — much of the intellectual horsepower driving them originated in academic labs,” Joseph Craft, the Paul B. Beeson Professor of Medicine (Rheumatology), and professor of immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine and the scientific director of the Colton Center for Autoimmunity, who works alongside Makoto Yoshioka, the fund’s director at Yale Ventures.
To date, the Colton Center has supported 49 projects with more than $5 million since 2020. The Roberts Innovation Fund, launched in 2022, has supported 30 projects with more than $2 million. And since 2017, the Blavatnik Fund has supported 98 projects with over $24 million in funding, leading to the formation of 35 biotech companies and the launch of eight clinical trials.
“In this day and age, people are looking for alternative ways to fund their research,” said Morag Grassie, executive director of the Blavatnik Fund. “They [faculty members] are starting to think about their research in an innovative, translational manner, which is very different from doing research for the sake of research.”
That includes faculty members like Ruzica Piskac, professor of computer science at Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science, and Scott Shapiro, the Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law at Yale Law School and professor of philosophy in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Together, with support from the Roberts Innovation Fund, they developed “Alfred,” a rule-based reasoning system that applies formal logic to answer questions in heavily regulated industries like insurance.
“Some of these industries are so heavily regulated that even law professors have trouble keeping track of the rules,” Shapiro said. “How is a regular person supposed to understand their rights and obligations, or know whether they are compliant?”
That’s where Alfred comes in, he says. Think of it as a virtual “concierge” that helps customer-facing employees handle questions about complex regulations. For example, an employee could use it to help a customer determine whether a flexible spending account would cover expenses from a hospital stay after a serious accident. Alfred guides users through a structured series of legally relevant questions and applies the encoded rules to produce an accurate, explainable answer.
“We do not want people to have to answer 46 questions just to get an answer,” Shapiro said. “We want to ask as few questions as possible, arrive at the legally correct result, and still give people an answer they can check.” That’s why the concierge also provides the underlying legal sources behind each response.
To further develop the system, in 2024 they launched the startup Leibniz AI. The company already has employees, worked with an early client to develop demo and pilot versions of the platform, and attracted interest from several venture capital firms.
“At first, we both thought running a startup would be a lot like running a lab,” Piskac added. “Little did we know that the differences are significant.”
Solutions for the world
Since receiving a Blavatnik award in 2022, Anne Eichmann’s company, D2B3, has grown. There was the formation of a launch team and advisory board, which includes such biotech veterans as Franz Hefti, former CEO of Prevail Therapeutics. The company also secured more than $500,000 in funding and won several pitch awards, including the Alexandria LaunchLabs Innovation Award and the IndieBio New York cohort.
Beyond those achievements, Eichmann and her team have been most excited about the application of their blood brain barrier (BBB) technology for treating a wide range of diseases and conditions. Most drugs do not cross the BBB, and so most brain diseases cannot be cured. But the D2B3 product has the potential to address this huge unmet medical challenge. Upon intravenous injection, the patent-protected agent transiently and selectively relaxes the BBB and allows delivery of various bioactive drugs against brain cancer, metastasis, infections, and neurological diseases.
Right now, the D2B3 product is in the preclinical testing stage in mice and non-human primates; the team is conducting lead optimization, safety, and efficacy studies before beginning the process for U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval.
“Our approach could allow a much simpler administration of the treatment and be potentially life changing for these children and also for many other patients with various neurological and neurodegenerative diseases,” Eichmann said.
With the help of Yale Ventures, she said, they’re getting one step closer to changing lives.
