Startups to Watch: Novilla Pharmaceuticals

Editor’s note: This is one of our Startups to Watch of 2022. See the rest here.

Startups to Watch fans will recognize Ajay Kori, the serial entrepreneur who appeared on last year’s list for Allay Lamp, his startup with a device to help alleviate migraines and reduce anxiety. Now he has another company worth keeping on the radar: Novilla Pharmaceuticals Inc.

The early-stage biotech, founded in 2019, aims to end the opioid epidemic with a Harvard University-born technology that can change the way drugs are delivered.

Novilla, which licensed the platform from the former Harvard professors who developed it, bought all of the intellectual property “because of its potential,” Kori told us. It delivers drugs below the skin to target a specific spot on the body, rather than via a pill that works systemically throughout. The goal here is to eliminate adverse side effects while benefiting the organ or area that requires the therapy. Novilla’s pipeline includes “potential blockbuster drugs,” Kori said, starting with a pain medication that the company is now advancing through the regulatory approval process. That drug “has the potential to eliminate the need for opioids because it can turn off pain without any of it getting to your brain and causing addiction,” he said.

Novilla, still pre-revenue, raised $6 million last fall to fund clinical studies for its platform, as well as preclinical data on other drugs in its pipeline. That followed $3 million in seed funding in 2019. The company — based in Arlington with a lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts — is currently recruiting, namely for a vice president of pharmaceutical development.

Kori started the company with his father, Dr. Shashi Kori, a physician and pharmaceutical industry veteran who was “one of the first to prescribe opioids to terminally ill brain cancer patients” before the epidemic broke out, Ajay said. They teamed up with Dr. Eric Fossel, a Harvard professor who helped discover a method to deliver drugs directly through the skin to the nerves. At that point, Ajay stepped away from his day-to-day duties as CEO of yet another startup he had co-founded, online flower delivery platform UrbanStems, where he remains board chair.

“When I ran UrbanStems, I really burned myself out and, as such, wasn’t as good of a leader as I could have been,” he said. He’s since focused on his self-care, with therapy, meditation and sleep, he said, “and now feel like I can do a lot more than I could years ago — including running two companies.”

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