Apollo Health Ventures

Apollo Health Ventures is a transatlantic venture capital firm specializing in the development and investment in biotechnology and health technology companies, with a focus on longevity biotech. They focus on interventions that target the underlying metabolic drivers of aging as well as the ensuing age-related cellular, molecular, and tissue damage and dysfunction.

In addition to conventional venture investment, Apollo’s  Venture Lab partners with scientists to create companies from the ground up that unlock untapped technologies, allowing them to acquire founder shares in companies with high potential at very low cost. Unlike some incubator-style longevity biotech portfolio companies, Apollo’s companies are all separate legal entities with their own individual shareholders, though the company does encourage collaboration among them.

The company is led by Nils Regge and Ole Mensching, co-founders and General Partners. The company began after the two of them visited The Buck Institute in 2016. While they were impressed by how quickly longevity science had progressed in the previous two decades, they were equally nonplussed by the lack of interest from investors and the low rate of company formations. Regge remarked, “we are the first generation of human beings to begin to comprehend aging on a biochemical level, and it has changed everything. We, as serial entrepreneurs, were convinced that we had to do something about it. Our answer was to establish Apollo Health Ventures — the first venture capital (VC) firm specializing in venture creation in the aging sector.”

The company was founded in 2017 with a US$20M fund, and they closed their second fund in 2021, oversubscribed and with $180M in commitments, including from large institutional investors.

Apollo’s companies include:

Booster Therapeutics
Booster Therapeutics is developing small molecules that directly increase the activity of the cell’s protein-degrading engines (proteasomes) to restore the body’s ability to clear out disease-causing proteins. While a number of companies are working on targeted degradation of specific disease-driving proteins using biotechnologies such as Proteolysis Targeting Chimeras (PROTACs), Booster’s approach targets the broader issue of dysfunction of the proteasome itself, which causes multiple protein pathways to go awry and contributes to many complex diseases, including diseases of aging.

Cleara Biotech
Cleara Biotech is a senolytic company founded on Peter de Keizer’s invention of FOXO4-DRI, a technology that interrupts a survival pathway on which senescent cells rely for survival. The company is focused on what they term “scarred” senescent and cancer cells rather than senescent cells in general; these “scarred” cells contain nuclear PML/FOXO4-foci, flanked by p53 phosphorylated on specific sites. Cleara has tested its lead compound, CL04183/Pivot, in multiple preclinical disease models across oncology, neurodegeneration, liver diseases, and cardiovascular disease.

Focal Biosciences
Focal Biosciences is working to develop a novel approach to cellular reprogramming based on mechanobiology that they term CFC (Chromatin Fingerprint for Cell state). They appear to claim that their chromatin-centered approach can not only reprogram cells into a broadly younger state, but reverse specific disease processes. Their first planned indication is for fibrotic diseases.

Refoxy Pharmaceuticals
Refoxy Pharmaceuticals is using its “F.act finder” (FOXO activator finder) discovery platform to identify and optimize small-molecule activators of the transcription factor FOXO3, variants of which are implicated in extreme longevity. They state, ambiguously, that their candidates “are functionally relevant across diverse disease models” and that their “lead asset has robust anti-fibrotic properties and is uniquely positioned to explore its therapeutic impact in Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF), a severe disease with high mortality and limited treatment options.”

Samsara Therapeutics
Samsara Therapeutics is a company working to develop small-molecule autophagy activators as medicines to combat age-related neurodegenerative diseases. Its screening platform validates potential autophagy activators using an in-house panel of patient iPSC (Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells) across different diseases and patient genotypes.

Thymofox
Thymofox is developing targeted, orally available therapies that induce thymic regeneration and rejuvenation to restore immune function in aging people and immunocompromised patients. The age-related involution and degeneration of the thymus impair its ability to produce new T-cells, which is thought to contribute to older people’s weakened resistance to new immune threats. Therefore, thymic regeneration could protect aging people against infectious disease and cancer.

Therini Bio
Therini Bio is a clinical-stage biotech company developing immunotherapies that target vascular dysfunction caused by fibrin deposits as an approach for neurodegenerative diseases of the brain and retina driven by vascular dysfunction. The principals of Therini believe that this vascular dysfunction and inflammatory response lead to neurodegenerative diseases that include Alzheimer’s and Diabetic Macular Edema (DME).

In May 2025, Therini announced that it raised $39 million in a Series A extension financing to fund Phase 1b trials evaluating its lead candidate, THN391, into a Phase 1b trial, as well as support development of a fibrin/VEGF bispecific.

Moonshot Venture Fellowship
The Moonshot Venture Fellowship is a yearlong program “designed to give scientists the experience and support to create, launch, and build a venture-backed life science company based on outstanding science.” Fellows are given the opportunity to gain the the skills needed to start companies, working  directly with Apollo’s longevity biotech-oriented  investors and scientists from a scientific concept to a candidate therapeutic and through to launch. Fellows are expected to discover and evaluate new science as investment ideas,  perform market research, and map out a research plan, clinical development plan, and a budget for a potential new company.