Raised in Plano, Curve Biosciences CEO and Founder Ritish Patnaik has built a tissue database to improve chronic disease monitoring.
By Will Maddox | D Magazine | December 4, 2025|2:54 pm
Ritish Patnaik is bullish on Dallas becoming one of the top three bioscience cities in the country. “You can quote me on this,” he told D CEO Healthcare. “Dallas will be the third hub. San Francisco and Boston will maintain wonderful biotech companies and talent, but I strongly believe that Dallas will be the third hub with the momentum of Pegasus and others in the community.”
Patnaik is putting his company where his mouth is. After a recent $40 million raise led by Luma Group, Curve Biosciences recently moved its headquarters to BioLabs at Pegasus Park while it searches for a new long-term home in the state.
The announcement about the funding arrived with the appointment of several C-suite roles at the company. The raise is being used to advance clinical validation and commercialization of the firm’s platform. Curve has operations in San Mateo, California, and New York City, but its administrative home is in Texas. The plan is for the company to operate out of BioLabs while it starts a bidding process for a 100,000-square-foot “forever home” in Texas.
“We believe Curve’s Whole-Body Intelligence platform represents the next frontier in clinical testing, with the potential to fundamentally reshape how we monitor and manage chronic disease,” said Themasap Khan, co-founder and partner at Luma Group. “By anchoring in human tissue data, Curve is building a clinically actionable platform with clear reimbursement potential and massive market applicability.” Additional participants in the raise included First Spark Ventures, Techas Capital, Micah Spear, Civilization Ventures, LifeX Ventures, Incite, Mintaka VC, NZVC, and others.
A Biotech Entrepreneur Comes Home
Patnaik grew up in Plano, the son of a teacher and a Texas Instruments engineer who went on to attend the elite Texas Academy of Math and Science in Denton, and was excited to bring his company back to Texas.
When Patnaik left DFW to pursue a PhD at Stanford University, he never thought he would be back. The region lacked the talent and infrastructure to support a robust biotech sector, but now, more than a decade later, Texas has quickly become an emerging biotech hub that continues to recruit companies like Curve Biosciences at a regular clip. Its growing academic medical centers, universities, and biotech-specific developments, such as BioLabs, have created fertile ground for the next wave of biotech entrepreneurs. With operations in New York and San Mateo, Dallas is the perfect place to split the difference while providing Curve with growth opportunities.
The state has been a supporter of the company from its early days. In 2024, Curve received a $11 million grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institution of Texas to support its work on a liver cancer screening blood test that eventually became the Whole-Body Atlas.
The Whole-Body Atlas
The biotech firm built an extensive tissue database that provides practitioners with more accurate information about the treatment of chronic disease. Called the Whole-Body Atlas, it is a collection of tissue samples of numerous organs at different disease states that will help anticipate chronic disease, guide treatment, and align stakeholders on the medical plan.
The platform can isolate biomarkers consistent with different disease states and help monitor chronic disease. Those biomarkers can be detected in a patient’s blood test and help determine the state of the organ’s disease, allowing patients and care teams to gain more clarity about how the treatment is going and make necessary adjustments. The atlas currently has 400,000 tissue samples mapping out 50 disease types.
Patnaik says that existing blood tests or organ imaging don’t provide the specificity that Curve’s technology can achieve, and that outcomes suffer as a result. “As a result of our test, these patients are going to have a better understanding of their disease, such that they can make the right changes or take the right treatments so they can live longer.”
The company’s ultimate goal is for the database to help guide the treatment of dozens of diseases. Still in its early stages, the company will prove its concept by focusing on one disease at a time. Patnaik says there is significant interest and a strong need for better liver disease monitoring. “The vision is that we start with one organ and then we expand gradually to the other organs such that ultimately you are getting a whole body perspective through a blood test.”
The test will benefit patients, be utilized by physicians, but the payers are the customers for Curve Biosciences. Curve wants its tests to be covered by insurance so it can help guide treatment to be more cost-effective and drive better outcomes, which is also the goal of employer payers and their insurance company administrators. Meanwhile, patients benefit from better treatment, physicians are better able to meet patient needs, and pharmaceutical companies have more information about how their drugs affect chronic disease.
Because the test focused on patients who are already ill, it doesn’t need FDA approval. But Curve is undergoing a rigorous trial period that Patnaik hopes will begin in 2028, with the test going live with patients in clinics sometime in the next five years.
As the company reaches those milestones, Patnaik looks forward to bringing it home to North Texas. Texas is a wonderful state in which to do business. The state has done a wonderful job to incentivize businesses to either start there or to move there, and that’s definitely a big selling point for us,” Patnaik says. “Many people are being trained in the jobs that we’re looking for, and the clinical infrastructure throughout Texas is amazing.”