Inspired by Mother Nature, Discovering New Drugs: Viswa Colluru on The Long Run

Viswa Colluru is today’s guest on The Long Run.

Viswa is the founder and CEO of Boulder, Colo.-based Enveda. The startup company, founded in 2019, is focused on discovering and developing small molecule drugs with novel mechanisms of action. It relies on a chemistry-based approach to drug discovery, drawing inspiration from products found in nature.

The privately held company has come a long way in a relatively short time. Founded in 2019 with about $50,000 of bootstrap capital from the founder himself, it has gone on to raise $517 million at a reported valuation of about $1 billion.

Enveda’s platform is designed to take plant samples with known medicinal properties, and interrogate them to understand what the active molecules in there are doing biologically.

Enveda’s approach has already produced three drug candidates in clinical trials, all with novel targets and mechanisms of action. One is being studied for atopic dermatitis and asthma, another is for obesity, and a third is for inflammatory bowel disease.

Natural product chemistry inspired the early decades of the pharmaceutical industry, but largely fell out of favor as the tools of molecular biology and genomics improved. Enveda represents a fusion, or a bridging, if you will of both worlds.

Viswa is personally something of a bridge builder. He emigrated from Southern India to the US. He draws inspiration from both places, both traditions, as he maps out the future for a company seeking to develop effective new medicines for people around the world.

Before we get started, a word from the sponsor of the show.

 

 

In Life Sciences, the ‘information gap’ is where portfolios go to die. You aren’t just tracking tickers; you’re tracking Phase III data, FDA shifts, and patent moats. If you’re waiting for the news cycle to catch up, you’re already too late.

That is why I use AlphaSense.

It is an AI-powered market intelligence platform designed to help investors and operators find critical insights faster. Think of it as a search engine for the entire financial and life sciences landscape, aggregating over 500 million documents across company filings, clinical trial registries, FDA documents, earnings calls, expert transcripts, broker research, and industry publications into one unified, searchable platform.

For those researching biotech, medtech, and the broader life sciences landscape, it is a game-changer, purpose-built to surface the clinical, regulatory, and commercial insights that matter most.  You can use Smart Summaries to instantly synthesize thousands of pages of trial data, regulatory filings, and KOL commentary, while Channel Checks and expert insights help you understand how therapies are actually being adopted in the real world across physicians, payers, and hospital systems, not just how they are modeled on paper.

I used it recently to research a pair of articles on Timmerman Report, looking for patterns in the most recent acquisitions of Eli Lilly and Merck.

Instead of spending hours digging through 10-Ks, AlphaSense surfaces the ‘Alpha’—the specific insights that move the needle—in seconds. 

To experience it firsthand, you can start a free trial at alpha-sense.com/thelongrun.

 

 

Bioanalysis should not rely on which scientists at the CRO you get. These are assays, not consulting. Your results should be the same, regardless of who does the work.

“We love working with our CRO… when we get the right PI” is a red flag, not a compliment. And if the quality of your bioanalysis depends on which principal investigator happens to be assigned to your study, you don’t have a CRO partnership, you have a lottery ticket.

Dash was built around automation and standardized workflows specifically to eliminate that variability. Every study gets the same rigor and the same rapid turnaround, days not weeks, across ELISA/MSD, LC-MS, and PCR. GLP-compliant, transparent pricing, guaranteed outcomes.

You shouldn’t have to ask who’s running your study. You should just get great data.

Visit www.dash.bio

Now please enjoy this conversation with Viswa Colluru on The Long Run.