Hi! I’m Doug, the founder of Pace Pharmaceuticals.

I’m developing drugs for common neurological diseases. My lead asset is PAC-832, a novel, selective small molecule GalR1 antagonist for improving cognition in Alzheimer’s disease patients. The drug has sub-micromolar potency for GalR1 and >30x selectivity over GalR2/3. It also has excellent manufacturability, low toxicity, and great pharmacokinetics, including passing the blood-brain barrier. Read more about PAC-832:

• PAC-832: A New Drug for Alzheimer’s Disease — general overview of the drug
• A selective, brain-penetrant GalR1 antagonist restores cholinergic signaling in vitro and rescues cholinergic cognitive deficits in mice — detailed technical writeup

I’m now preparing PAC-832 for Phase 1 clinical trials — specifically, scaling up manufacturing, as well as preparing for animal toxicity studies. I’m concurrently working on a second drug for schizophrenia, PAC-1231, that is still in the discovery phase, but has promising early results.

The company is just me right now. It’s fully bootstrapped using my personal savings. All the labor to develop and test PAC-832 (including the organic synthesis, analytical chemistry, formulation science, assay development, bioanalysis, cell experiments, mouse experiments, and data analysis) was done by myself, my dad, ChatGPT, Claude Code, and an OpenTrons OT-2 liquid handling robot.

Stay tuned. The first one person unicorn will be a pharma company.