Organizations

Research Bridge Partners works with a variety of partners – charitable foundations, family offices and research institutions – to identify, fund and commercialize biomedical innovations capable of saving and enhancing human life. We invest both not-for-profit and for-profit capital to enable them to achieve their investment objectives – financial, societal, or a combination thereof.

Aphorism Foundation

Aphorism Foundation

Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation

Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation

Karen Toffler Charitable Trust

Karen Toffler Charitable Trust

Lyda Hill Philanthropies

Lyda Hill Philanthropies

Termeer Foundation

Termeer Foundation

University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

Portfolio Companies

Equity investments in startups with faculty as scientific co-founders.

Our Fellows

A Research Bridge Partners Fellow is among the preeminent innovators working at an American research university today. According to our proprietary data analytics, each possesses both the scientific acumen and commercial mindset to become scientific co-founders of scaling startup companies. Therefore, we invest the financial and human capital required to transform their scientific breakthroughs into investable companies for the benefit of people everywhere.

dr anslyn
Eric Anslyn, PhD
Mike Buszczak, PhD
Dr. Phil Corlett
Philip Corlett, PhD
Benjamin Greenberg, MD
Phil Low, PhD
Traci Lyons, PhD
Dr. Edward Marcotte
Edward Marcotte, PhD
Nancy Monson, PhD
Kate O'Donnell, PhD
Daniel Romo, PhD
Jeff SoRelle, MD
Tao Wang, PhD

Our Mentees

Former and Current

A Research Bridge Partners Mentee is a doctoral or postdoctoral researcher specializing in biomedicine at an American research university. Each works closely with a principal of our organization to discern the best approach for developing and commercializing an innovation. In addition to helping them distinguish between academic data, regulatory data and the data most valued by venture capitalists, we help a Mentee perform venture capital due diligence and craft business development strategies ranging from pitch deck design to talent acquisition.

Dogan Can Kirman, PhD

UT Southwestern Medical Center

Eric David, PhD

University of Texas at Dallas

Jennifer Smith, PhD

UT Southwestern Medical Center

Lauren Cozzens

University of Colorado Anschutz
Medical Campus

Maggie Wang

UT Southwestern Medical Center

Sina Khorsandi, PhD

UT Southwestern Medical Center

Sumana Venkat, PhD

UT Southwestern Medical Center

Yehui Sun

UT Southwestern Medical Center

Yessica Santana Agreda

Oregan Health and Science University

dr anslyn

Dr. Eric Anslyn, PhD

Eric Anslyn, PhD is University Distinguished Teaching Professor and Welch Regents Chair in the Department of Chemistry at The University of Texas at Austin. In 2018, Anslyn was selected by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to be an HHMI professor. Prior to joining the University of Texas, Anslyn completed postdoctoral work at Columbia University in New York. He has authored more than 300 scientific articles and filed more than 50 patents. Anslyn is a cofounder of Erisyon, Inc.

Mike Buszczak, PhD

Michael Buszczak is the Lillian B. and Tom B. Rhodes Professor in Stem Cell Research at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where he also serves as Associate Director for the Hamon Center for Regenerative Science and Medicine. He has spent over fifteen years studying how ribosomes and mRNA translation influence development and disease. Mike recently won the BlackStone LaunchPad Pitch Competition, and the Pegasus Park Commercialization Milestone Award, based on his efforts to develop new reporters that can be used to trace ribosome biogenesis at single cell resolution in real time.

Dr. Phil Corlett

Philip Corlett, PhD

Philip Corlett, PhD is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry & Psychology at Yale University. He brings more than 20 years of experience in applying computational models to dissecting the lived patient experience, beginning with his PhD at the University of Cambridge, and then as a faculty member at Yale. He has 115+ papers published in high profile journals, including Science, Neuron, Brain, PNAS, JAMA Psychiatry, World Psychiatry, Lancet Psychiatry, Trends in Cognitive Sciences and the Journal of Neuroscience, with over 10,000 citations. Phil also recently won the Translational Research Award from the International Schizophrenia Research Society.

Dr. Benjamin Greenberg, MD

Dr. Benjamin Greenberg is a Distinguished Teaching Professor and a Cain Denius Scholar at the University of Texas Southwestern. He serves as the Vice Chair of Clinical and Translational Research for the Department of Neurology and is the co-Founder of GenrAb. He has spent more than 20 years in translational research and has a focus on preclinical therapeutic development and clinical trials for neuroscience indications.

Philip S. Low, PhD

Philip S. Low, PhD is the Presidential Scholar for Drug Discovery and Ralph C. Corley Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Purdue University.  Dr. Low has spent more than 45 years doing pioneering work in the fields of tissue regeneration, infectious diseases, erythrocyte membranes and auto-immune diseases.  He has published more than 500 articles and has 500 patents/patents pending. Dr. Low is the co-founder of three RBP portfolio companies: Novosteo, Eradivir, and MorphImmune.

Traci Lyons, PhD

Traci R. Lyons, PhD is an Associate Professor, Medicine-Medical Oncology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Her lab investigates mechanisms of breast cancer metastasis using models of postpartum breast cancer progression and patient samples from the University of Colorado Young Women’s Breast Cancer patient cohort. Dr. Lyons also serves as the Senior Scientist for the Young Women’s Breast Cancer Translational Program led by her long-term collaborator Virginia Borges, MD.

Dr. Edward Marcotte

Edward Marcotte, PhD

Edward Marcotte, PhD is the Mr. and Mrs. Corbin J. Robertson, Sr. Regents Chair in Molecular Biology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also serves as Co-Director of the Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology. Dr. Marcotte has spent more than 20 years researching proteomics, synthetic biology and bioinformatics and has authored more than 200 articles and filed 16 patents on his work. He is the co-founder of Erisyon, Inc.

Nancy Monson, PhD

Nancy Monson, PhD is Associate Professor in Neurology with a dual appointment in Immunology at UT Southwestern Medical Center. She is a pioneering neuroimmunologist specializing in immunogenetics and the impact of adaptive immunity on diseases of the central nervous system. Her strengths are facilitating research across multiple disciplines including immunology, genetics, physiology and neuroscience particularly in arenas that require active collaborations with clinicians.  In conjunction with Benjamin Greenberg, MD, a Distinguished Teaching Professor and a Cain Denius Scholar at the UT Southwestern, Dr. Monson established the UT Southwestern Neuroscience Biorepository.

Kate O'Donnell, PhD

Kathryn O’Donnell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at UT Southwestern Medical Center. She received her B.S. in Genetics from Cornell University and her Ph.D. in Human Genetics from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 2005. Her graduate work in Dr. Chi Dang’s laboratory focused on investigating the mechanisms underlying MYC-mediated tumorigenesis, establishing important roles for Transferrin Receptor 1 (TFRC1) and microRNAs in this oncogenic network. Kate completed postdoctoral fellowship training in the laboratory of Dr. Jef Boeke in the Molecular Biology and Genetics Department at Johns Hopkins. During this time, she was awarded a fellowship from the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation. Her work involved both the application of existing transposon-mediated mutagenesis systems to perform forward genetic screens in mice and the development of new mutagenesis platforms for cancer gene discovery. In 2011, Kate was recruited to UT Southwestern Medical Center as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and received a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) Recruitment of First-Time Tenure-Track Faculty Member Award. Her current work is focused on understanding the mechanisms that contribute to lung tumor initiation, progression, and metastasis and applying insights from these studies towards the development of new therapies for lung cancer. Several projects investigate the regulation and function of oncogenic cell surface proteins using molecular and biochemical studies, functional genetics, and mouse models. She is supported by awards from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the Department of Defense (DoD), the Welch Foundation, the V Foundation, and CPRIT. 

Daniel Romo, PhD

Daniel Romo, Ph.D., is a second-generation Mexican-American who has been blessed, along with his wife Laura, to parent 5 unique, beautiful boys: Matthew, Zachary (an Aggie), Nathan (a Baylor Bear), Jedidiah (an Aggie), and an ‘adopted’ son, Bryan. Romo is the Schotts Professor of Chemistry at Baylor University and co-Director of the Baylor Synthesis and Drug-Lead Discovery Laboratory. Romo received his B.A. degree in chemistry/biology from Texas A&M in 1986 with a senior thesis involving the synthesis of sirenin, a water mold sex pheromone, derivatives and bioassays for SAR. This was a first-hand introduction to the exciting chemistry/biology interface that continues to peak his interest to this day. He received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Colorado State in 1991 as a NSF Graduate Fellow with the late Prof. A. I. Meyers studying diastereoselective cyclopropanations of bicyclic lactams. As an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow in the labs of Prof. Stuart L. Schreiber at Harvard from 1991-1993, he led the team that completed a total synthesis of the clinically used immunosuppressive agent, rapamycin. In 1993, he returned to Texas A&M as an Asst. Professor and was promoted to Assoc. Professor in 1999, Professor in 2003, and then given the Gradipore Chair in 2014. In Fall 2010, he established the Natural Products LINCHPIN Laboratory and in Summer 2011, he initiated the TAMU Undergraduate MiniPharma Research Program. He has had the pleasure of mentoring 40 Ph.D. students, 9 M.S. students, 35 post-doctoral researchers, and >150 undergraduate researchers. In June 2015, he joined Baylor University where he established, with Prof. John Wood, the Baylor Synthesis and Drug-Lead Discovery Laboratory and in 2016 he started the Baylor Undergraduate MiniPharma (http://sites.baylor.edu/minipharma/). His research group’s primary research interests include:

  • Pharmacophore-Directed Retrosynthesis Applied to Bioactive, Marine Natural Products
  • Asymmetric Synthesis, Novel Transformations, and Activity-Based Profiling of Beta-Lactones
  • Novel Organocascade Processes Involving Unsaturated Acylammonium Salts
  • Methods for Conversion of CO2 to Beta-Lactones Involving Photocatalysis and Flow Chemistry

Jeff SoRelle, MD

Jeff SoRelle, M.D. is an Assistant Professor of Pathology at the University of Texas Southwestern, where he performs NIH sponsored research in genetics and acts as a medical director of the clinical NGS laboratory. He has 15 years of experience in translating scientific findings in genetics and immunology from the bench to bedside. As a Founder of CereusDx, he leads efforts to make highly multiplexed genetic testing available to patients with cancer, infections, and antibiotic resistance.

Tao Wang, PhD

Dr. Tao Wang leads a top AI-for-science lab at UT Southwestern Medical Center, specializing in the development and deployment of AI-driven solutions for immunology discovery. His interdisciplinary research integrates machine learning, statistics, medicine, and biology to extract meaningful insights from high-dimensional biomedical data. His work focuses on leveraging public and in-house high-throughput datasets to uncover mechanistic insights into human diseases, particularly immunological disorders, with implications for diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. He applies cutting-edge AI techniques to model T/B cell antigens and receptor sequences at the molecular level, analyze single cell and spatially resolved transcriptomics data at the cellular level, and integrate genomics with electronic medical records at the patient level.