Brent Vaughan

Brent Vaughan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Eratos Therapeutics, the first world model of biology built upon ground-truth nanoscale data to transform CNS drug discovery from probabilistic search into deterministic engineering. Founded alongside Dr. Ed Boyden (MIT), Eratos leverages its proprietary ASCEND platform and a hierarchical World Model - trained on a 10-petabyte multi-omic corpus comprising over 200 billion structural signatures and 3 trillion spatial tokens - to resolve the "dark matter" of the CNS proteome.

Eratos is resolving the "spatial blindness" of legacy models by autonomously identifying and blueprinting novel disease-emergent targets, including cryptic and ternary pockets, directly from native human tissue. The platform enables a 10x advantage in capital efficiency, and has demonstrated it can move from tissue analysis to the identification of a novel emergent target and a rationally designed drug lead in less than 90 days. Eratos’s lead programs, including a first-in-class cryptic pocket modulator (ER-402) and a novel molecular glue for amyloid-targeted TPDs (ER-606), represent a new class of precision-engineered neuro-therapeutics designed for neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric indications.

Brent has led and scaled multiple companies in the CNS space, including Cognito Therapeutics, where he led the development of a late-stage, disease-modifying Alzheimer’s therapy that is currently in pivotal trials and received FDA Breakthrough Designation, and Cognoa where he led the efforts to develop the first FDA approved computer vision and AI software medical device in CNS. He has broad operational and deal-making experience across pharma and medical device companies including Saegis Pharmaceuticals, Nektar Therapeutics, Roche and Lilly.