Pear Therapeutics, Inc.

T.Rx’s $77.5 million fund was supported by Robert Langer, plus a collection of global investors including founders at Third Rock Ventures, Polaris Partners and more. \n Biotech entrepreneurship must run in the blood for the Langers.  Moderna co-founder Robert Langer is helping guide a new venture capital firm, T.Rx Capital, which closed its $77.5 million inaugural fund on Thursday. But Robert won’t be the only Langer in the business, as the firm was co-founded by his son, Michael Langer. Michael Langer has previously helped found family investment firm Old Silver VC, which invested in the likes of Big Hat Biosciences and Seismic Therapeutics, and has also previously held leadership roles at the digital therapeutics company Pear Therapeutics.Michael Langer, along with fellow co-founders Pear Therapeutics’ former CEO Corey McCann, M.D., Ph.D., and Eli Lilly vet Kwesi Frimpong-Boateng, want T.Rx to back “visionary founders” at the intersection of technology and biology. That includes companies that operate in biotechnology, techbio and tech-enabled services, according to a Sept. 18 press release.  “As biology and technology converge, we see a historic opportunity to build scalable platforms that can fundamentally reshape disease treatment,” Michael Langer said in the release. “We partner early with scientifically rigorous, execution-focused teams and provide the capital, network and strategic support to help them build durable value from day one.” Along with financial backing from Robert Langer, who will serve as the firm’s executive chair, the first fund was supported by an investor base that includes family offices and “high-net-worth individuals” across the globe. The VC\'s first fundraise is also backed by individual founders from Polaris Partners, Lux Capital and Third Rock Ventures.The fund will focus specifically on company creation through series B financing, with the firm’s ultimate goal being to build a portfolio of 10 to 15 companies, writing checks worth $5 to $10 million, and taking active roles in company creation and governance. T.Rx has assembled a star-studded lineup of industry leaders to serve on its advisory board, including Robert Langer, who McCann called “our fearless leader” in a LinkedIn post. Robert Langer has co-founded more than 40 biotechs and is one of nine Institute Professors at MIT, the highest title a faculty member can achieve at the prestigious university. Joining him on the board is Mark Levin, the founder of Third Rock Ventures; Boston Scientific co-founder John Abele; Voyager Therapeutics CEO Al Sandrock, M.D., Ph.D.; former FDA Chief Counsel Peter Barton Hutt; and ex-Pfizer CMO Freda Lewis-Hall, M.D.  The T.Rx founders believe now is the time to launch given the “unique window” 2025 presents for biotech investment, Frimpong-Boateng added in the release.  “With exit markets recovering, this is an exceptional time for venture capital to support the next wave of transformative biotech companies,” he said.  

A new life sciences VC firm officially launched on Thursday morning, a rarity in today’s funding environment. Much of the money being pumped into life sciences venture funds in recent years has gone to veteran shops like ARCH Venture Partners and Omega Funds that have built dozens of startups over decades. Only a few new outlets like Cure Ventures and Dimension have popped up since the pandemic-fueled buzz faded. In this case, one of the industry’s most well-known researchers is behind the new firm, alongside his son and other industry leaders. Bob Langer, the MIT chemical engineering professor and co-founder of Moderna, is the executive chair of T.Rx Capital, which put together $77.5 million for its inaugural fund. The firm’s managing partners are former Pear Therapeutics CEO Corey McCann, Michael Langer, Langer’s son and a former executive at Pear, and Kwesi Frimpong-Boateng, a former senior director of business development at Eli Lilly. The firm, founded in 2023, initially had a bigger ambition for the inaugural fund. It had set a hard cap of $175 million, according to an SEC filing . “This will be the full close. We made a deliberate decision to close the fund earlier — at $77.5 million — so that we could immediately start investing and take advantage of the market,” Michael Langer told Endpoints News . He said now is a “really good time to be investing” since many startups have “more friendly valuations,” echoing a long-held notion that investing during a downturn is the best time to do so. The Langer family has been an investor for many years. Bob Langer has co-founded more than 20 companies with the blue-chip firm Polaris Partners, according to the Polaris website. As a high schooler, the younger Langer interned at Polaris, he said. In more recent years, the Langer’s operated a “family-associated investment firm” called Old Silver VC, which backed material science and digital health companies, among other startups. The Langer’s and colleagues are now running a broader VC outfit at T.Rx, where they have an impressive roster of advisors. That includes Third Rock Ventures founder Mark Levin, former Pfizer Chief Medical Officer Freda Lewis-Hall, Boston Scientific co-founder John Abele, Voyager Therapeutics CEO Al Sandrock and former FDA chief counsel Peter Barton Hutt. T.Rx plans to invest in about 12 to 15 startups across biotech, techbio and tech-enabled services, according to Michael Langer. This is where the firm’s name comes from. It’s a combination of ‘T’ for technology and ‘Rx’ for prescriptions. The firm has already backed seven companies, all of which are based in the US, he said, and T.Rx could invest in other geographies in the future. T.Rx generally writes checks of about $5 million to $10 million, mainly at the seed and Series A stage, and it aims to both incubate companies and invest in existing startups formed by other firms. The search and evaluation process is quite broad. Over the past year, T.Rx has looked at about 1,500 opportunities, according to McCann. With their investment thesis, the team was able to “pretty easily disqualify 80% to 90%” of that big bucket, he said. The company has broad interest that includes oncology, specialty psychiatry and neurology, and immunology, McCann said. One of its investments has been in the burgeoning radiopharma space, which has attracted the interest of most big pharmas in recent years. “We ran into a company that we felt was really uniquely generating new binding moieties to hopefully move from liquid tumors to solid tumors, which is the holy grail of that space,” McCann said. Meanwhile, T.Rx built a company when the team noticed it wasn’t seeing any promising new treatments for intractable pain and chronic neurology conditions. “We looked across the landscape of different MOAs [mechanisms of action] that were of interest and really didn’t see anything to be able to treat intractable pain in a way that we thought would be durable,” McCann said. “So there we started a NewCo from the ground up, brought in the biology and built with the founders.”

A new venture fundco-founded by the son of serial biotechnology entrepreneur Bob Langer announced the close of its first fund on Thursday, banking $77.5 million.Called T.Rx Capital, the firm aims to invest in ten to 15 companies working at the intersection of technology and biology, which it described in a statement as including biotechs, techbio startups and those specializing in tech-enabled services.In an email to BioPharma Dive, Michael Langer, the son of Bob Langer and one of the firms three founders, wrote that, within drug development, the company will consider investments in next-generation modalities like cell and gene therapies, radiopharmaceuticals and novel biologics. Outside of that scope, the firm is interested in AI-driven drug discovery, as well as digital tools that might speed development.The team sees a unique deal flow to early stage companies, he said, from its ability to draw ideas from a network of more than 1,000 alumni who have worked in Bob Langers lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and are now active across academia and industry.In addition to his prolific work as a scientist at MIT, Bob Langer has helped form dozens of biotech companies, among them Moderna in 2010. Hes also the firms executive chairman.We wanted to create a new venture platform built from the ground up to combine deep operator experience with access to one of the most robust innovation ecosystems in the world, Michael Langer wrote.T.Rx will target early-stage investments, focusing on company formation through Series B investments. It plans to invest between $5 million to $10 million in each startup and have active roles in creation, scale and governance, it said in its statement.The fundraise was supported by a variety of family offices and limited partners, including individual founders of prominent biotech investment firms like Polaris Partners, Third Rock Ventures and Arch Venture Partners.T.Rx is run by Corey McCann, the former CEO of digital therapeutics developer Pear Therapeutics;Kwesi Frimpong-Boateng, a former business development director at Eli Lilly; and Michael Langer, who formerly oversaw licensing at Pear.Michael Langer previously founded Old Silver VC, a family investment vehicle, and spent time at investment firms like Polaris and Boston Seed Capital.The firms scientific advisory board includes Bob Langer, Third Rock founder Mark Levin,former Pfizer Chief Medical Officer Freda Lewis-Hall and current Voyager Therapeutics CEO and longtime Biogen executive Al Sandrock. Its name is a fusion of the well-known symbol Rx, for medicine, and T for technology, the company said.With exit markets recovering, this is an exceptional time for venture capital to support the next wave of transformative biotech companies,Frimpong-Boateng said in the statement. '