The Future Of Drug Discovery Is 4 Billion Years Old (Viswa Colluru, Founder & CEO at Enveda)

About this episode

Viswa Colluru discusses the importance of nature in drug discovery and shares his personal journey in founding Enveda Biosciences.

For decades, drug discovery has shifted away from nature and toward biology-first approaches. Viswa Colluru believes that shift was a catastrophic mistake. His company, Enveda Biosciences, has raised over $500 million to build a “search engine for nature’s chemistry.” The mission is personal: he grew up around his father’s pharmacy in India and later lost his mother to a treatable cancer whose medicine his family couldn’t afford. Many life-changing medicines, including morphine, aspirin, and metformin, originated in nature, but there has never been a reliable, scalable way to systematically explore its chemistry. Colluru founded Enveda in 2019 with $55,000 of his own savings to change that. The company has since identified 18 drug candidates, with three now in clinical trials. In our conversation, we explore: • Why the pharmaceutical industry abandoned nature (and why that was a massive mistake) • How Enveda built a system to decode unknown molecules in nature • The deeply personal story of his mother’s battle with leukemia and how it shaped his life’s work • Why old ideas, from immunotherapy to natural products, often hold the most latent potential • How Enveda developed 18 drug…

People in this episode

Guest: Viswa Colluru

Topics covered

• drug discovery
• nature
• pharmaceutical industry
• biotechnology

Keywords

• Enveda Biosciences
• chemistry
• clinical trials
• natural products
• immunotherapy

Mentioned in this episode

Products: Brex, Enveda, Enveda Biosciences

Places: India

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