Health Transformer Spotlight: Meet the Serial Entrepreneur Behind Owl Therapeutics, Helping the Brain Repair Itself
StartUp Health community member Owl Therapeutics is pioneering microglia-boosting medicines for Alzheimer’s disease and traumatic brain injury. By combining generative AI drug design with biomarker-driven precision, the clinical-stage team is building a therapeutic pipeline to help the brain clear harmful debris and repair itself.
Owl Therapeutics brings together deep scientific, clinical, and business expertise to advance a new class of neurotherapeutics. The company is the first clinical-stage, AI- and biomarker-powered biopharma focused on Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain injury, and adjacent brain conditions. Building on the discovery of unexpected waves of brain biomarkers in the blood of patients, Owl is preparing for advanced preclinical studies with its three leading assets for Alzheimer’s disease and Phase 2 clinical trials of its lead asset for traumatic brain injury. In this Q&A, co-founder Will Haskins, PhD, shares why supercharging microglia, the brain’s amoeba-like immune cells that eat brain cell debris, could revolutionize the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases.
Q&A with Will Haskins, PhD
What sparked Owl Therapeutics? Tell us the origin story.
Owl Therapeutics is a spin out of Gryphon Bio – a diagnostic company transforming brain health with biomarkers. The Gryphon team helped pioneer the first FDA-cleared blood test for traumatic brain injury. After a few years of additional research, we realized that biomarker powered drug development gave us a strong competitive advantage, in terms of sophisticated instruments, assays, antibodies, reagents, and algorithms for preclinical and clinical readouts. We had also accumulated thousands of patient samples and therapeutic targets from our proteomics studies.
Why microglia, and what problem are you solving for patients?
We are addressing the problem of worsening microglial clearance of brain cell debris in injury, infection, aging, and disease-particularly in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI). We are helping your brain repair itself.
When did it click that TBI and Alzheimer’s are connected, and what did you discover?
We discovered a convergence point for Alzheimer's disease, traumatic brain injury, and adjacent brain conditions. Microglia are the amoeba-like immune cells of the brain and the primary cells responsible for clearing (eating) pathogens and cell debris in the brain through a process known as phagocytosis. Our multidisciplinary team has deep generative AI-powered drug and biomarker development expertise in immuno-oncology, neuro-immunology, and mitochondrial biology. We realized that improving the brain health of patients by protecting and enhancing microglial clearance of brain cell debris was just as important as any traditional therapeutic targets.
What personal experiences pulled you into this mission?
My grandmother, who was a very free spirit, suffered from Alzheimer's disease, and I suffered a traumatic brain injury just after high school. We have also discovered that our lead therapeutic targets are at elevated levels in blood and CSF samples from both traumatic brain injury and Alzheimer’s disease patients, providing strong evidence that traumatic brain injury is a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.
In plain language, how would you explain your approach to a fifth grader?
We are making new medicines to help your brain take out the trash.
How will clinicians and patients use it?
Chronic dosing of Owl’s drugs by subcutaneous infusion (autoinjector) only once every six months is our ideal user experience.
What is the world missing about this field that you think is a big deal?
Significantly, we and others are establishing that traumatic brain injury is a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, with elevated levels of overlapping therapeutic and biomarker targets. This means that scientists and clinicians from the two fields can learn from each other with expected and unexpected synergies that will benefit the development of new drugs to supercharge microglia for patients. We are also very excited about applying generative AI tools to engineer novel drugs with combinatorial modifications that cannot be designed with traditional, one experiment at a time, thinking.
Where are you in development today, and what is coming next?
We have two Alzheimer’s drugs in advanced preclinical testing phases and one Alzheimer’s drug in the earlier in vitro testing phase – with lots of additional backups from generative AI drug designs. We also have a Phase 2 clinical asset for traumatic brain injury.
What gives you an unfair advantage?
A dream team for drug development that loves to work together on the toughest problems.
Who is on the team?
Our team is brilliant, driven, scrappy, highly interdisciplinary, and loves solving puzzles of all kinds-which keeps spirits high even when times are low.
Any formative moments, mentors, or chance encounters that shaped the company?
I met one of our key advisors – who inspired me to be an entrepreneur – by happenstance at a biotech investment club having a pizza party. Who you sit next to at a party and resonate with can change your life.
Have there been eureka moments or inflection points that told you you’re on the right track?
Numerous. For example, our team has a long history of late-night brainstorming. Just last night we were up until 1am at an Airbnb in Palo Alto brainstorming how to tackle previously unasked biological questions in Alzheimer’s drug development – and back at it bright and early at 6am. The team members are the key ingredients and the chefs!
What is your Health Moonshot mission in one line?
Our mission is to improve the lives of patients suffering from microglial worsening.
How will the world be different if you succeed?
No Alzheimer’s drugs, including those approved, have clearly met their clinical endpoints with unshakable, statistically-significant findings as a disease modifying therapy. We aim to provide a new era of hope for Alzheimer’s patients by being the outlier, with incontrovertible data for FDA approval of our drugs based on clinical endpoints, target engagement, and pharmacodynamic biomarkers.
Patients will confidently and correctly take their medications knowing that their physicians have confidently backed the clean FDA approvals for Owl's drugs to supercharge microglia for brain health.
Contact Owl Therapeutics via email
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Published: Sep 2, 2025
Produced by Nicole Kinsey
