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Founders: John Foglesong, Sanket Mishra, Brian Blagg
Established: 2021
Top executives:
John Foglesong, CEO and president
Daniel Flynn, chief strategy officer
Michael Rafferty, head of preclinical development
Sanket Mishra, vice president of research
Equity raised: $1 million seed round, $800,000 and $1 million from two bridge rounds, $700,000 Small Business Technology Transfer grant (non-equity) from the National Institutes of Health
2024 revenue: none
Projected 2025 revenue: none
Employees: 2
Locations: Indianapolis and South Bend
Affiliations: The company is based on technology invented by Blagg, a University of Notre Dame chemistry and biochemistry professor, with Sanket Mishra, a former Notre Dame research scientist. The company was spun out of Notre Dame’s IDEA Center.
Patents: one issued, three provisional patent filings
What does the company do? Grannus is an early-stage oncology drug development company, focused on commercializing drugs to treat patients with multiple types of cancer, including ovarian, breast, prostate and pancreatic. The company said its “novel approach selectively inhibits specific versions of the protein Hsp90, a well-known but challenging target for oncology therapeutics.”
What problem is it trying to solve? The company said there have been significant advancements in the treatment of ovarian cancer over the last decade, with the approval of a new class of drugs called PARP inhibitors that have been proven to reduce the risk of death 45%. But the majority of patients are not able to benefit from PARP inhibitors, the company said, because their tumors do not have deficiencies in key proteins that support DNA repair. Grannus said its Hsp90 beta-selective inhibitor can disrupt the DNA repair process and will allow more patients to benefit from PARP inhibitor therapy.
Latest news: Grannus closed an oversubscribed $1 million fundraising round in February and was a 2025 Mira Award finalist in the BioCrossroads Life Science Innovation Team category. And last year, Grannus won the 2024 IN-Prize Health Care pitch competition at Rally.
Why Grannus made the list: Nearly 25,000 women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer every year in the United States—almost all of them with advanced disease and facing a five-year survival rate of less than 35%. Grannus’ technology has the potential to make a lifesaving treatment available to far more people.•
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