The Seat That Closed, Then Two Buyers

On August 12, 2026, InduPro put out a release announcing two things at once: it had closed a $77 million Series B, and it had dosed the first patient in the Phase 1 study of IDP-001, the lead programme its platform was built to produce. Reading down the list of investors, two names sit apart from the venture firms - Sanofi, and Eli Lilly and Company.

Those are not ordinary backers. They are the sort of buyer a biotechnology chief executive spends a career trying to interest, and in this case both had signed research collaborations with the company first and written equity cheques afterwards.

Twenty-nine months before that release, Prakash Raman, InduPro's chief executive, had left the top job at a company that did not survive the year.

Fourteen Years Buying Science

Raman spent the first half of his career on the other side of the table. A senior scientist at Millennium Pharmaceuticals from 1999 to 2005. Then Novartis, in two stretches totalling nearly fourteen years, broken by a year at AstraZeneca running project management for infectious diseases. He finished at Novartis in October 2019 as vice president and global head of business development and licensing for the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research.

That is the job of deciding which outside science a very large company should buy. Olema Oncology, appointing him to its board in April 2026, listed what he helped guide through: Advanced Accelerator Applications, Endocyte, IFM Tre, Selexys. Radiopharmaceuticals, immuno-oncology, inflammation. Four acquisitions in four different corners of the field.

Then he crossed over. From October 2019 to February 2022 he was senior partner and chief business development officer at Flagship Pioneering, the firm that builds companies rather than buying them. In February 2022 he stopped advising and took a seat.

The Seat That Closed

Ribon Therapeutics was a privately held company developing first-in-class small molecule drugs for oncology and immunology, working on a family of enzymes that cells switch on under stress. Raman was its president and chief executive from February 2022 to March 2024, according to the biography filed in a proxy statement by Black Diamond Therapeutics, where he sits on the board.

He left in March 2024. On August 5, 2024, BioSpace reported that Ribon had shut down its business operations.

Two years running a company, and the company is gone. That is the line on the record, and no amount of subsequent financing erases it.

What Proximity Actually Means

He did not wait. The proxy statement puts his start at InduPro in April 2024 - one month after leaving Ribon, four months before the shutdown was reported. It was made public on June 13, 2024, alongside an $85 million Series A co-led by The Column Group and Vida Ventures, with Merck's venture arm, Emerson Collective and Euclidean Capital participating.

InduPro had been formed in 2022 around an unusual premise. Most cancer drugs are aimed at a target because that target is common on tumour cells. InduPro maps something else: which proteins sit next to which other proteins on the cell surface, and whether a particular pairing occurs in tumour tissue and nowhere else. Find such a pair, build an antibody that only engages when both are present, and the drug becomes selective by geometry rather than by biomarker.

"Our team is highly focused on precisely defining the spatial proximity of proteins on the surface of cells," Raman said when the financing was announced. The pitch was explicitly against the crowded field: "Instead of a limited subset of targets with known disease biology, we are discovering novel targets and best-in class approaches for areas of high unmet need."

The complication is in the calendar. That same June 2024 release set an expected filing for an investigational new drug application in the fourth quarter of 2025, with a Phase 1 to follow. The first patient was dosed in August 2026.

The Buyers Became Investors

What happened in between is the part of the record that reads like vindication of the platform rather than of the timeline.

In December 2025 InduPro announced a strategic investment and research collaboration with Sanofi on a bispecific for autoimmune disorders. A month later, on January 7, 2026, it announced a global collaboration and licensing agreement with Lilly covering up to three targets, with a total deal value of up to approximately $950 million and an equity investment attached. Lilly gained access to InduPro's machine-learning membrane interactomics platform; InduPro kept the early discovery work.

"Our partnership with Lilly underscores a shared commitment to advancing a new generation of tumor-selective medicines guided by the spatial biology of cancer," Raman said. "TAPAs represent a fundamentally new way to think about tumor antigens."

The abbreviation stands for Tumor-Associated Proximity Antigens, the co-located surface pairs the platform is built to find. A man who spent fourteen years assessing other people's platforms for Novartis had now sold the thesis of his own to two of the largest buyers in the industry inside thirteen months.

The Clinic Decides Now

IDP-001, the drug that reached a patient in August, is a bispecific antibody-drug conjugate aimed at EGFR and at TAPA-E1, a proximity antigen the platform identified. The open-label first-in-human study is enrolling adults with advanced or metastatic squamous and non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer and other squamous solid tumours whose disease has progressed after standard care - a population where the precision-oncology advances of the last decade have largely not landed, because the driver mutations and surface targets those drugs rely on are less common in squamous tumours.

Raman's language about it is notably flat. "With IDP-001 now in the clinic, our focus is on disciplined clinical execution." "I am pleased with how effectively our team has advanced the program," he added, pointing to interest from trial sites as the study expands.

He is 56. He sits on outside boards at Black Diamond Therapeutics and Olema Oncology. He has raised $162 million across two rounds for InduPro and signed two pharmaceutical partners, one of them worth up to nearly a billion dollars.

None of that is what the record will finally turn on. A first-in-human study measures safety, tolerability and early signs of activity in patients who have run out of options, and it produces its answer on its own schedule. The seat he held before this one closed five months after he left it. This time the drug is in a patient, and the readout belongs to the trial.