Welcome to Partnology’s Biotech Leader Spotlight Series, where we highlight the remarkable accomplishments and visionary leadership of biotech industry pioneers. This series is about showcasing the groundbreaking strides made by exceptional leaders who have transformed scientific possibilities into tangible realities. Through insightful interviews, we invite you to join us in following the inspiring journeys of these executives who continue to shape the landscape of the biotech industry. This week we are recognizing:
Subhi Marwari is the founder and CEO of NeuraClick, where she invented the company’s AI and click-chemistry platform for engineering next-generation neuropeptide therapeutics for disorders of dysregulated stress circuitry. A well-recognized expert in CNS drug delivery with more than two decades of experience in neuroscience drug development, she has led programs across the full arc of drug development – from discovery through IND-enabling toxicology and into first-in-human – and has advanced five CNS programs to the clinic.
Her career spans biotech, pharma, and academia. As a Senior Investigator at GEMMA Biotherapeutics (formerly the UPenn Gene Therapy Program), she led multiple clinical programs in rare and focal epilepsies and earned the University of Pennsylvania’s Conscientious Investigator Award for a robotic neurosurgery technique that substantially de-risked preclinical CNS research. She has also held senior leadership roles at global CROs and co-founded two biotech startups.
She earned her PhD in Pharmacology from the National University of Singapore (NUS), completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Scripps Research, and trained in clinical psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical University – grounding her science in the realities of patient care. A Wharton Executive Program alumna and former Entrepreneur-in-Residence at BLOCK71, NUS Enterprise’s global startup hub, she was recently named to the San Diego Business Journal’s 2025 Most Influential Leaders in Life Sciences. She also serves as Vice President of Lions Club International, advancing STEM access for underserved girls in rural India.
You’ve built your career at the intersection of science, business, and patient impact—what was the inflection point that pushed you to found NeuraClick?
There wasn’t a single inflection point. NeuraClick was the culmination of both a personal mission and a career-long focus on translational drug development.
On a personal level, I witnessed what chronic stress, depression, and metabolic dysfunction can do to individuals and families, and later in my career, I lost a colleague to suicide. These experiences stayed with me and strengthened my resolve to work on diseases where the unmet need remains enormous. Over the years, I’ve found myself continually drawn to communities where these conditions hit hardest — veterans, women, and young adults — a constant reminder that behind every scientific program is a human story.
Scientifically, my career has always been centered on drug discovery and development. Even before starting my PhD at the National University of Singapore, I worked in a commercial biotech environment as a pharmacologist and toxicologist, where pharmaceutical companies and academic groups brought molecules for preclinical testing. That experience taught me an important lesson early on: the real innovation happens when multiple disciplines unite.
My PhD then grew from basic research into a comprehensive drug development effort spanning medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, and neuroscience, around one question: how does stress reshape the brain to drive behavioral and metabolic diseases, and can we therapeutically modulate those pathways? My postdoctoral work in clinical psychiatry approached that same question in reverse — from patients back to the bench, using human genetics to understand why some patients respond to treatment while others don’t — and carried into opioid drug development at Scripps Research in Florida.
From there, I joined what is now known as GEMMA Biotherapeutics in Philadelphia, where I was fortunate to lead multiple clinical programs focused on rare and focal epilepsies. It was where, for the first time, I sat face-to-face with patients living with these devastating diseases. That experience moved me in a way that science alone never had; the realization that a medicine I helped create today might one day change someone’s life felt like the most meaningful work I could do – not only in my career, but in my entire life. I later consulted for Lilly and took on leadership roles at two global CROs, advancing toxicology programs toward clinical development.
Across all of it, I kept hitting the same wall: the most compelling biology in the brain was often the hardest to turn into medicine. The bottleneck was rarely the biology — it was the chemistry and druggability.
Today, NeuraClick exists because that wall is finally coming down. Advances in computational design, molecular engineering, and our understanding of complex brain circuits are opening real opportunities to unlock the therapeutic potential of neuropeptides – particularly for disorders driven by dysregulated stress and reward pathways.
So, in many ways, founding NeuraClick was not a departure from what I had been doing throughout my career – it was the natural extension of it.
NeuraClick is focused on unlocking neuropeptides for complex conditions like depression and addiction—why focus specifically on neuropeptides as the foundation of your platform?
We focus on neuropeptides because that’s where the biology of these diseases actually lives — and, for the first time, where we can finally reach it.
For decades, nearly every medicine for depression, anxiety, or addiction has worked through the same handful of monoamine systems: serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. Those molecules mattered, but they are relatively blunt instruments. They affect broad regions of the brain rather than acting within the specific circuits where the disease is, which is part of why so many patients never respond and why side effects are so common. The field has spent forty years refining the same chemistry rather than opening new biology.
Neuropeptides are a fundamentally different kind of signal – the brain’s precision modulators, released in specific circuits and often only under specific conditions such as stress. And the systems that govern stress, reward, and metabolism are overwhelmingly neuropeptidergic. For example, corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) and dynorphin-kappa-opioid system on the stress axis; orexin and oxytocin on reward; the melanocortin system, and GLP-1 on metabolism.
These aren’t isolated targets. They are interconnected nodes in a single network, which is exactly why so many of these conditions are comorbid, and why a single molecule that reaches the right node can address more than one of them at once. When someone experiences chronic stress, for example, they may also become more vulnerable to addiction or metabolic disease because many of the same underlying neuropeptide circuits are involved. This creates a unique therapeutic opportunity. A molecule that can precisely modulate the right neuropeptide pathway has the potential to address multiple disease dimensions simultaneously.
Historically, however, the challenge was never target validation. It was that neuropeptides were pharmaceutically fragile – rapidly degraded, with limited tissue exposure, and hard to deliver to the brain – so many promising systems stayed biologically fascinating, but clinically out of reach.
What has changed over the past decade is our ability to engineer these molecules. Advances in computational design, molecular engineering, and macrocyclization chemistry now let us improve stability, tissue exposure, durability, and drug-like properties while preserving the biology that made them attractive in the first place.
And the rest of the field is beginning to validate this shift. GLP-1 transformed metabolic medicine and is now being explored in addiction, and major neuroscience companies are building programs around neuropeptide systems such as CRF for the very stress and metabolic indications we focus on. When the most sophisticated players move toward the same biology, it tells you where the field is headed.
So, for us, neuropeptides aren’t one target – they are a validated, interconnected class of systems sitting at that intersection, and they are the foundation on which everything at NeuraClick is built.
That also means we started asset-first, around this biology; the engineering capability grew out of solving these molecules, not the other way around.
AI is central to your platform—what specific decisions or workflows has it meaningfully improved at NeuraClick?
We view AI as an enabling technology, not the product itself. It is central to how we work, but I am always wary of anyone who treats it as the whole story.
One of the fundamental challenges in peptide drug discovery is the sheer size of the design space. Even modest modifications to a peptide can change its potency, selectivity, stability, tissue exposure, and manufacturability all at once. And as I mentioned earlier, neuropeptides are inherently fragile – a molecule can bind beautifully to a receptor but degrade too quickly, or be perfectly stable yet never reach the brain. Testing every possible combination experimentally is neither practical nor efficient.
This is where AI earns its place at NeuraClick. It helps us determine which molecules are actually worth building and testing. Rather than relying solely on intuition or traditional trial-and-error approaches, we use computational models to prioritize designs, evaluate structure-activity relationships, and identify modifications most likely to improve multiple key drug-like properties simultaneously. In practical terms, a process that used to take weeks now takes minutes; instead of working through several thousand candidates, we come away with a ranked set of six to ten designs, with a level of predictive quality that lets us commit our chemistry resources with real confidence.
But every prediction still has to be earned in the lab. AI is genuinely powerful at narrowing a vast design space, yet it remains unreliable at predicting some of the properties that matter most downstream – toxicity, immunogenicity among them – and those only reveal themselves in living systems.
So biology remains the final arbiter. I describe our approach as a partnership between computation and experimentation – AI helps us navigate complexity, but the value comes from integrating computational design, medicinal chemistry, and translational pharmacology.
The model proposes, the lab disposes; and every cycle of real data makes the next round of predictions sharper.
And that points to what matters most. For us, the goal is not simply to move faster with AI. It is to make better decisions – and, ultimately, to increase the probability of developing therapeutics with real clinical potential.
How do you think about crossing the blood-brain barrier—arguably one of the biggest challenges in CNS drug development?
What continues to amaze me is that the blood-brain barrier is still often framed as the defining obstacle for peptide therapeutics. I’d argue the field has already moved past that question – peptides and proteins can reach the brain and profoundly influence its function. We see it everywhere in normal physiology: appetite and energy balance are regulated by insulin, leptin, ghrelin, GLP-1, and neuropeptide Y; sleep and arousal are governed by orexin; social behavior is influenced by oxytocin and vasopressin. Peptide signaling is not peripheral to brain function — it is fundamental to it.
And this is no longer theoretical – it is in the clinic now. GLP-1 receptor agonists are the clearest proof: peptide drugs that drive profound changes in centrally regulated appetite and behavior. The amylin class makes the same point – pramlintide has been approved since 2005, and long-acting analogs such as cagrilintide and petrelintide are advancing through late-stage obesity trials. These molecules act, at least in part, through the area postrema, a brainstem region where the barrier is naturally more permissive.
And it reaches well beyond metabolism. Early clinical studies of intranasal neuropeptide Y have shown signals in PTSD and depression, delivered directly to the brain through the nose. Similarly, companies such as Protagenic Therapeutics are developing synthetic analogs of the brain peptide TCAP, which is in clinical development for stress-related disorders, including treatment-resistant depression and PTSD. These are neuropeptide-based therapies that act centrally and are already being tested in humans.
Beyond approved medicines, decades of research have shown that peptides can access and influence the CNS through multiple mechanisms, including endogenous transport processes, regions where the blood-brain barrier is naturally more permissive, direct nose-to-brain pathways, and, in some cases, direct CNS administration.
So to me, the real question was never whether peptides can reach and influence the brain – we know they can. The more important question is whether we can engineer these molecules to achieve sufficient CNS exposure, residence time, and target engagement to produce meaningful therapeutic effects. Historically, neuropeptides have been limited by rapid degradation, short half-lives, and poor pharmacokinetics, making sustained modulation of neural circuits difficult.
I think of this as a first-generation versus second-generation challenge. The first-generation question was – can peptide biology access and modulate the CNS? The field has largely answered that question. The second-generation challenge is: Can we engineer molecules that deliver the CNS exposure, durability, and pharmacological performance necessary to become practical medicines? That is exactly the transition the field is in now. Advances in peptide engineering, conformational stabilization, macrocyclization, and computational design are letting us preserve the powerful biology of endogenous neuropeptides while fixing the properties that held them back.
That second-generation challenge is what NeuraClick was built to solve. Our goal is not to show that a molecule enters the brain – that bar has been cleared. Our goal is to engineer neuropeptides that achieve sufficient and durable engagement of the relevant circuits to produce meaningful, reproducible clinical outcomes.
For many years, the limiting factor in this field was never the biology — it was the molecule. What excites me today is that molecular engineering is finally beginning to change that equation.
How do you position a highly technical platform like NeuraClick’s to investors who may not have deep domain expertise?
One lesson I’ve learned is that investors don’t need to understand every detail of the science. What they need to understand is the investment thesis — why the opportunity has the potential to create value. So I start where they already are, not where the molecule is.
I lead with the problem, not the technology. CNS disorders – depression, addiction, and metabolic disease – are among the largest unmet needs in medicine, still served by drugs that are often decades old. Everyone understands that; the scale of the need is legible, even without a background in neuroscience.
From there, I move to the thesis, which is actually quite simple. We are not inventing new biology. We are starting with neuropeptide systems that evolution has spent millions of years refining to regulate stress, reward, and metabolism – biology that is already validated by nature. And there’s a reference point every investor trusts: GLP-1, a peptide-based medicine that reshaped an entire disease area. When I say we’re unlocking that same kind of biology for the brain, it lands, because they’ve seen what happens when it works.
Only then do I talk about technology, and I frame it in terms of risk reduction rather than technical detail. The question is not, “How does the technology work?” The key question is, “What made this impossible before, and why is it possible now?” The honest answer is that the biology was never in doubt – what held these molecules back was their fragility as drugs, and modern peptide engineering has changed that. It’s a single, retirable risk they can evaluate, not a lecture on macrocyclization.
From there, the conversation moves to what actually matters to them. By starting with naturally occurring pathways and engineering molecules for stability, half-life, exposure, and durability, we can pursue differentiated medicines with attractive safety profiles, scalable manufacturing, patient-friendly dosing, and genuine blockbuster potential.
Importantly, we are deliberately asset-first, not platform-first. We build from a focused lead program and expand strategically from that foundation rather than spreading resources across multiple unrelated targets. This allows us to remain disciplined while staying focused on a biology we understand deeply.
Investors also want to understand what their capital will accomplish. So I lay out the path to the clinic as a series of value-inflection points. From a validated pathway, the near-term work is nominating an engineered development candidate; then the safety, pharmacokinetic, and manufacturability studies regulators require before a molecule can be given to a person; and then the milestone that matters most – first dose in a human. Each step meaningfully reduces risk and increases the value of the asset, and because that lead molecule can branch into adjacent indications, reaching the clinic doesn’t just de-risk one program – it opens several.
Ultimately, I see this as a translation exercise. Scientists tend to start with the technology and work outward; investors start with the outcome and work backward. My job – the same one I’ve done my whole career – is to bridge the two, and to show how advances in molecular engineering can translate biologically validated pathways into real patient impact and commercial opportunity.
Looking further ahead, do you envision NeuraClick becoming a fully integrated biopharma or remaining a platform-driven innovator?
We have always been an asset-first company. NeuraClick was founded on a therapeutic opportunity, not on a platform – on understanding how neuropeptide biology could translate into real medicines for disorders driven by dysregulated stress, reward, and metabolism. As we advanced those programs, we repeatedly encountered the same problems: peptide engineering, stability, exposure, and therapeutic durability. Solving those problems required us to build increasingly sophisticated capabilities, and over time, our technology platform emerged from that work. In that sense, the platform is a product of the assets — not the other way around.
So I don’t see the future as a binary choice between being a platform company and a fully integrated biopharma. Our objective is simpler and, I believe, more durable than either label: to build valuable therapeutic assets and advance them in whatever way creates the most value for patients and shareholders.
In the near term, that means advancing our lead program to clinical proof of concept. That is where the science gets validated, where the most risk comes off the table, and where we earn the right to make bigger structural choices – most of which are premature until the biology has proven itself in humans.
Beyond that, differentiated assets create options. We may advance some assets ourselves, and others may be best developed through partnerships with large pharmaceutical companies. In some cases, co-development models may make the most sense. And over time, we may continue expanding our own capabilities where doing so creates a strategic advantage. The right path will differ by asset. Some opportunities may address markets so large and global that a major pharmaceutical partner is the best route to maximizing impact and value. Others may target more focused indications where a lean, specialized organization can advance programs much further on its own. The decision should follow the asset, not an ideology about the model.
What will not change is our focus on therapeutics. The platform matters because it helps us make better medicines, but it is not the end goal. The end goal is delivering transformative therapies to patients who need them.
Ultimately, I believe the most successful biotechnology companies are defined not by whether they call themselves a platform or a biopharma, but by their ability to consistently translate exceptional science into meaningful medicines that improve people’s lives. That is the kind of company I want NeuraClick to become.
