Marc F. Pelletier arrived in New Haven for a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale in 2002, knowing he wanted to form a biotech company “that would make the largest impact in medicine.”
Four years later, Pelletier and Walter Boron, a professor in Yale’s Department of Cellular & Molecular Physiology, co-founded Aeromics, to create a drug that would control edema (swelling) and improve patient outcomes by targeting molecular water channels.
They were inspired by Peter Agre, who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of these water channels, called aquaporins, which facilitate the movement of water across cell membranes, and by Norwegian neuroscientist Ole Petter Ottersen, whose research on aquaporin-4, a water channel situated at the blood-brain barrier, demonstrated its ability to reduce blood-brain water uptake. more