Almost two decades ago, Celdara Medical was founded in Lebanon, New Hampshire, to take medical inventions from university labs and develop them into clinical stage therapies. One of the challenges with biomedical research is that many promising discoveries never reach the patients who need them. Celdara was created to address this challenge.
Jake Reder, president and CEO of Celdara, helped create the New Ventures Office at what is now the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. As director of that office, he learned about specific challenges from faculty and realized that the next step might be better served by a company outside the university. Reder and Professor Michael Fanger co-founded Celdara Medical in 2008.
Today, Celdara reviews hundreds of innovations annually, choosing only a small percentage to navigate through preclinical phases. It serves as a bridge between the university discovery phase and larger biopharmaceutical partners who acquire and license derisked assets.
“In our industry, there are many steps between invention and the market,” Reder said. “The development of therapeutics is highly regulated, and rightfully so; these can be extremely potent molecules, cells or other therapeutic modalities. There is typically a three- to five-year preclinical development period where we're testing to make sure these products are safe, effective and manufacturable.”
At any given time, Celdara is working on five to ten therapies or programs. While Dartmouth was the university that inspired the company and still holds a special relationship with it, most of Celdara’s projects now come from other universities, including international schools.
“We will look at any disease that has a significant unmet medical need that is expected to remain unmet for the time it takes to develop the drug,” Reder said. “There's a competitive aspect there, where we look at the current standard of care, as well as everything else that's in development. We typically want to bring first-in-class drugs forward, because those provide the biggest advances for patients. They’re how medicine really gets changed.”
The core of Celdara’s mission is improving patient lives, which is why it’s so important for them to focus on unmet needs when they acquire assets and to find partners who truly care about the asset when they pass it on.
“Our company’s only reason to exist is to improve human health, and any decision we're making should be in that direction, including our partnering, our sourcing and what the development should look like,” Reder said. “We have crystal clarity on whom we're serving and what we need to bring to them to make their situation better.”
Celdara Medical joined NH Life Sciences soon after the industry association launched. While the promotion of life sciences and networking opportunities were important, what made joining easy was the NHLS Edge program.
Reder said every CEO needs to consider how dollars spent will impact patient care and the overall budget. The cost-saving from the NHLS Edge program was a worthwhile investment.
“It really was a no-brainer,” Reder said. “The cost of membership is very quickly recouped, and if that’s not compelling in and of itself, then all the great work with our peer companies and our elected representatives that NHLS is doing is the icing on the cake.”
In 2025, NHLS members saved more than a million dollars through the Edge program, which offers members exclusive discounts and preferred partner terms. Member companies get preferential rates from lab equipment suppliers such as Fisher Scientific and Middlesex Gases, as well as from vendors for office supplies and corporate travel.
For companies like Celdara that are developing precommercial technologies, cost efficiencies can be critical to ensure life-saving breakthroughs make it through a high-risk stage of the biotech process.
In an industry where time, cost, and complexity can derail even the most promising discoveries, the right support behind an asset can make all the difference.