Based: Cambridge, MA
Founded: 2007
Website: www.elevenbio.com
CEO: Mark Levin (interim)

The Scoop: The single most valuable asset at Eleven Biotherapeutics is the brain power being brought to the table by a group of distinguished scientists and a pack of aggressive venture players who are pioneering a new generation of protein therapeutics. Teamed with a pair of deep-pocket venture groups and headed by Third Rock's Mark Levin--the former Millennium chief who once again is donning the cap of interim CEO of a startup biotech company--Eleven has its platform technology up and running, with plans to start striking collaboration deals in the New Year.

What Makes it Fierce: Eleven Biotherapeutics is a classic start-up in the Third Rock mold. The venture group has six to eight discovery programs under its roof at any given point, and its staffers often do double-duty directing the start-up stage of new developers. So it is with Eleven, a name inspired by Christopher Guest's character on the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap (Nigel Tufnel), who liked to crank up the music level to 11--on a 10-point scale.

To put it another way: Eleven is thinking over the top.

Early this year Levin and his scientific founders--Reza Dana and Gregory Verdine from Harvard, K. Christopher Garcia from Stanford, Casey Weaver from the University of Alabama and K. Dane Wittrup at MIT--emerged from stealth mode with a $35 million Series A round in the bank and plans to staff up with a team of 20 by the end of this year.

Eleven's three protein engineering specialists and its ophthalmology expert are focused on three areas of biology: the Th17 pathway and its associated cytokines concentrating on inflammation, coagulation and muscle biology. The Eleven team has started work on six programs in those three areas of biology, with "two maybe three in animal models by the end of the year. Next year we'll have animal model data on six to eight molecules on those three areas."

Eleven's "Darwinian approach" to creating a protein engineering platform should give the developer four-plus programs a year, says Levin. Animal models should tell them if they're on the right track and those that are will move forward. Those programs that don't, won't. By 2012, Eleven expects it will have one, perhaps two programs in the clinic.

Says Levin: "It's a very aggressive pipeline." And Levin is a very aggressive CEO. That $35 million Series A, he says, may be the biotech's only round.

"Our ultimate goal is that it lasts forever," he adds. And that can be done with a "major" alliance in 2011 and another in 2012. With the end of the me-too drug development program, pharma has been working steadily down the pipeline as it executes new pacts. The Phase III standard deal slid to a Phase II, says Levin, then Phase I and now discovery is where most important new collaborations get started.

Venture Backers: Third Rock and Flagship Venture.