Antares

Antares Therapeutics develops small-molecule drugs against cancer targets long considered "undruggable" — proteins that don't have an obvious pocket for a drug to bind to. It works the problem from three angles at once: medicinal chemistry using proprietary compound libraries and mass spectrometry to find new binding pockets on hard targets, target biology focused on first-in-class or "best-through-first" validated targets, and predictive sciences using physics-based modeling and machine learning to speed up discovery cycles. The company exists because of an unusual deal structure: when Eli Lilly acquired Scorpion Therapeutics in March 2025, rather than fully absorbing it, Lilly spun out Antares as an independent company that retained Scorpion's discovery engine and pipeline. It is led by Scorpion veterans — CEO Adam Friedman (Scorpion co-founder), CSO Erica Jackson (ex-Genentech, ex-Scorpion Chief Discovery Officer), and a leadership team with prior stints at Genentech, Novartis, Amgen, and Pfizer. Antares closed a $177M Series A in June 2025 (Atlas Venture, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Abingworth, BVF Partners, Cormorant Asset Management and others), the same month it struck a $105M upfront collaboration with Novartis on undruggable oncology targets, alongside an existing AstraZeneca partnership and two clinical-stage EGFR inhibitor programs licensed to Pierre Fabre Laboratories.