“I wish I was a bat,” Theresa Heah says.
The two-decade industry veteran has glided into a new CEO post at Paratus Sciences, a Polaris Partners– and ARCH-backed startup working to turn findings from the biology of bats into new medicines. The only mammal to fly, bats could give clues to treating metabolic diseases, inflammatory and immunology conditions, among other areas.
“[A bat] can manage inflammation, it can process all this high-sugar diet. There’s also been data that showed us that bats can have a longer health span,” Heah said in an interview a few weeks into her new post at the New York City-based biotech, which employs about two dozen people, including a few in a Singapore lab.
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