June 2025

This year's annual meeting, held at the Ritz-Carlton, St. Louis on April 29th, marked RiverVest's 25th anniversary. Attendees heard from RiverVest Co-Founder and Managing Director Jay Schmelter, as well as members of the RiverVest team, about the progress, challenges, and opportunities across the Firm's investment portfolio.

Representatives of three portfolio companies presented updates on clinial progress:

• Keting Chu, MD, PhD, founder & CEO/chairman of Bluejay Therapeutics
• Peter McWilliams, PhD, chief business officer of Glycomine
• John McKearn, PhD, managing director of RiverVest, re: a "stealth" company

A RiverVest panel discussed the firm's dual sector strategies:

• Biopharma: Enthusiasm for Neuroscience (Pascal Krotee and Isaac Zike)
• Device: Gamechangers (Derek Rapp, Jay Schmelter and Karen Spilizewski)

And Tom Melzer, co-founder and managing director of RiverVest, reflected on his 25 years in life science venture capital with RiverVest.

Clockwise from top left: Keting Chu, Peter McWilliams, John McKearn, Tom Melzer and RiverVest team panel (Derek Rapp, Pascal Krotee, Isaac Zike, Karen Spilizewski, and Jay Schmelter).

Elias Zerhouni in conversation with Niall O'Donnell

Elias Zerhouni, MD, a professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University and vice chairman and president of OPKO Health, served as the director of the National Institutes of Health under President George W. Bush.

Watch the full conversation: (Link to video)

Joining us from Paris, Dr. Zerhouni shared his candid views on healthcare and biomedical research in the US. Three key takeaways were:

1. The US leads in biomedical innovation thanks to a robust ecosystem.

• Federal funding supports basic research, universities train talent and generate ideas, and the Bayh-Dole Act (also known as the Patent and Trademark Law Amendments Act) allows discoveries to become commercial opportunities.

• Together, these forces set the stage for venture capital to help fledgling companies translate medical breakthroughs into products.

2. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is accelerating drug discovery and reinventing care delivery.

• Dr. Zerhouni views AI as "the most important revolution" in medicine, enabling researchers to predict protein structures, reduce time in the lab, and design clinical trials more effectively.

• Beyond R&D, AI is revolutionizing the way we care for patients. Wearable digital biomarkers and predictive models, for example, can guide treatment in real-time, shifting us from reactive, episodic care to continuous, data-driven population health management.



3. Breakthroughs require collaboration across disciplines.

• Reflecting on his experience leading the NIH, Dr. Zerhouni expressed his concerns about a completely centralized one-size-fits-all healthcare system. He advocates for a decentralized model, similar to the Federal Reserve, in which regional leaders have the flexibility to respond to local health needs and drive innovation.

• He also maintains that today's biomedical challenges are too complex to solve in silos; multidisciplinary collaboration is essential. Throughout his career in academic and corporate research, Dr. Zerhouni has assembled teams of biologists, physicists, data scientists, and others in the shared pursuit of scientific progress.

RiverVest portfolio company Glycomine recently raised $115 million in a Series C financing to fund a Phase 2b clinical trial of GLM101 – a novel sugar replacement therapy for treating a congenital disorder of glycosylation (CDG) known as PMM2-CDG. 

GLM101 has demonstrated safety and efficacy in an ongoing Phase 2 open-label study and received both Orphan Drug and Rare Pediatric Disease Designations. The Phase 2b trial will involve 40 to 50 patients at 10 to 14 sites across the United States and Europe, with 24 weeks of placebo-controlled dosing followed by 24 weeks of open-label treatment. Patient enrollment is expected to begin in mid-2025, with interim results anticipated in mid-2026.

We invite you to read "The Sugar Fix" to learn more about Glycomine’s promising solution for treating a life-threatening rare disease. 

For up-to-the-minute portfolio company news and announcements, be sure to visit the RiverVest website and follow us on LinkedIn.

Recent announcements include:

RiverVest Venture Partners is a leading life science venture capital firm focused on improving the lives of patients, supporting entrepreneurs, and earning the trust of investors through science, strategy, and innovation. 

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