b'GLP-1 and similar drugs such as OzempicWere making and Wegovy bring weight loss and other health benefits, but these peptides have thereally good drawbacks of requiring refrigeration and then administration by injection. Peptides are also about 40 times more expensive to produceprogress on our than small-molecule drugs that can be taken in pill form, Traggis says.science. Thats The former Pfizer teams expertise would transfer directly to small-molecule, orallybecause wedelivered, obesity-drug development. Whats more, by leasing the former Array and Pfizerhave a teamstate-of-the-art facility, the team has been able to get laboratory operations up and runningthat wanted tovery quickly, saving millions of dollars and months of time.be based hereHaving fully integrated chemistry and biology operations is very unique for a company of ourin Colorado. size, Traggis says. This allows us to do things like develop our own cell lines for screeningAmbrosia BioSciences founder & CEO Nick Traggis novel candidate molecules. Having chemistryNICK TRAGGISseized an opportunity to hire top talent, building a FOUNDER & CEOcompany, hiring a team, and raising a Series A in and biology teams collaborate in-houseAMBROSIA BIOSCIENCES a matter of months.provides an immediate feedback loop on the potential success of a given compound, vastly speeding up development time.The recruiting of what would become a self-selected group of 25 former Array and Pfizer medicinal chemists, structural biolo-gists, and other scientists began. They were willing to take the risk of working for a startup, as Traggis puts it, to live, work, and play in Colorado. By August 2024, Boulder Venture Partners and BVF Partners had invested $16 million in Ambrosia. That December, a strategic investment from Merck helped lift funding to $25 million.We raised our Series A funding literally on just the stack of resumes that I assembled from that team, Traggis says. Thats what makes a startup work, right? Startups are all about people.Those people have much to accomplish to get to the target of clinical trials by 2027. Traggis is optimistic.We have an amazing team, he says. Were making really good progress on our science. We have the right people working on the right targets, and we are enabled by being based here in Colorado.2025-2026 BIOSCIENCE COLORADO 19'