Longwood Fund Strengthens Growth-Stage Investment Team
- Vikas Goyal, MBA, promoted to Partner to lead growth stage investments in late preclinical and clinical stage biotechnology companies.
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS / ACCESS Newswire / May 12, 2025 / Longwood Fund, a venture capital firm creating and investing in science-based companies that develop important treatments to help patients, today announced that it has further strengthened its investment team with the promotion of Vikas Goyal, MBA, to Partner, focusing on growth stage investments in late preclinical and clinical stage biotechnology companies.
Mr. Goyal has more than 20 years of experience as both a venture investor and executive focused on business development and transactional related initiatives in the biotechnology industry. He joined the Longwood Fund team in 2024 as a Venture Partner and led Longwood's investment in Evommune's $115 million Series C round of financing to advance their clinical-stage pipeline addressing chronic inflammatory diseases.
'We are excited to welcome Vikas and further strengthen our team at Longwood Fund,' said Christoph Westphal, MD, PhD, General Partner at Longwood Fund. 'I first worked with Vikas in 2011 when I was President and Head of SR One during a similar period of market dislocation. Longwood is actively making new investments, including recent investments in Newleos, Evommune, Engrail and Solu, and we continue to seek new investment opportunities. Vikas' successful track record as a biotech investor and dealmaker will be incredibly beneficial as we invest in and support a new generation of novel healthcare companies.'
'I have deep admiration for Christoph's, Aleks' and the whole Longwood team's commitment to biotechnology company building and venture investing,' said Mr. Goyal. 'I am honored to be promoted and to continue to help Longwood Fund support our syndicated growth investments.'
Mr. Goyal was previously Senior Vice President of Business Development for Pandion Therapeutics. He initially joined Pandion as a Board member and investor in 2018 and ultimately joined the company full-time in 2019 taking the company through a research collaboration with Astellas, an IPO and the company's acquisition by Merck for $1.85 billion in 2021. Mr. Goyal joined Pandion from SR One, where he invested in and served on the boards of 19 early-stage biotech companies including Morphic Therapeutics (acquired by Eli Lilly), River Vision Development (acquired by Horizon), Nimbus Therapeutics (Tyk2 acquired by Takeda), Spero Therapeutics (tebipenem acquired by GSK) and Pandion (acquired by Merck). River Vision and Horizon developed Tepezza™ (teprotumumab) a new standard of care in the treatment of Grave's Orbitopathy and the first therapy ever approved for the indication. Earlier in his career, Mr. Goyal was a Consultant at McKinsey & Co's Pharmaceutical practice in New Jersey, a co-founder of Extera Partners and a Business Development Manager at Infinity Pharmaceuticals. Mr. Goyal earned an MBA in Health Care Management from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in Neurobiology from Harvard University.
Longwood Fund
Longwood Fund is a venture capital firm dedicated to creating and investing in novel healthcare companies that develop important treatments to help patients while driving significant value for investors. The Longwood team has a long history of successfully launching and building important life science companies while providing operational leadership and strategic guidance. Collectively, the Partners at Longwood Fund have co-founded ~25 companies with over 20 launched or marketed drugs and therapies, as well as over two dozen clinical-stage assets, all focused on helping patients in need. Companies founded by Longwood Fund, or its principals prior to the founding of the Firm, as lead investor and CEO/CBO include Acceleron, Alnylam, Be Bio, Immunitas, Momenta, Newleos, Pyxis, Sirtris, Solu, TScan, Vertex, and Weaver. For more information, visit www.longwoodfund.com.
Contact InformationArielle Jackson Head, Corporate Communications 617-351-2590
SOURCE: Longwood Fund
press release
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


CBS News
19 minutes ago
- CBS News
Judge approves landmark NCAA settlement, clearing way for schools to pay athletes directly
A federal judge signed off on arguably the biggest change in the history of college sports on Friday, clearing the way for schools to begin paying their athletes millions of dollars as soon as next month as the multibillion-dollar industry shreds the last vestiges of the amateur model that defined it for more than a century. Nearly five years after Arizona State swimmer Grant House sued the NCAA and its five biggest conferences to lift restrictions on revenue sharing, U.S. Judge Claudia Wilken approved the final proposal that had been hung up on roster limits, just one of many changes ahead amid concerns that thousands of walk-on athletes will lose their chance to play college sports. The sweeping terms of the so-called House settlement include approval for each school to share up to $20.5 million with athletes over the next year and $2.7 billion that will be paid over the next decade to thousands of former players who were barred from that revenue for years. In a letter penned by NCAA President Charlie Baker following the announcement, Baker wrote that the settlement "opens a pathway to begin stabilizing college sports. This new framework that enables schools to provide direct financial benefits to student-athletes and establishes clear and specific rules to regulate third-party NIL [name, image and likeness] agreements marks a huge step forward for college sports." The agreement brings a seismic shift to hundreds of schools that were forced to reckon with the reality that their players are the ones producing the billions in TV and other revenue, mostly through football and basketball, that keep this machine humming. The scope of the changes — some have already begun — is difficult to overstate. The professionalization of college athletics will be seen in the high-stakes and expensive recruitment of stars on their way to the NFL and NBA, and they will be felt by athletes whose schools have decided to pare their programs. The agreement will resonate in nearly every one of the NCAA's 1,100 member schools boasting nearly 500,000 athletes. Wilken's ruling comes 11 years after she dealt the first significant blow to the NCAA ideal of amateurism when she ruled in favor of former UCLA basketball player Ed O'Bannon and others who were seeking a way to earn money from the use of their name, image and likeness, or NIL — a term that is now as common in college sports as "March Madness" or "Roll Tide." It was just four years ago that the NCAA cleared the way for NIL money to start flowing, but the changes coming are even bigger. Wilken granted preliminary approval to the settlement last October. That sent colleges scurrying to determine not only how they were going to afford the payments, but how to regulate an industry that also allows players to cut deals with third parties so long as they are deemed compliant by a newly formed enforcement group that will be run by auditors at Deloitte. The agreement takes a big chunk of oversight away from the NCAA and puts it in the hands of the four biggest conferences. The ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC hold most of the power and decision-making heft, especially when it comes to the College Football Playoff, which is the most significant financial driver in the industry and is not under the NCAA umbrella like the March Madness tournaments are.


CBS News
42 minutes ago
- CBS News
Springfield, Pennsylvania, commissioners approve micro-hospital, despite opposition from some residents
ChristianaCare has announced Springfield as its second location for a micro-hospital in Delaware County. This comes after the Springfield board of commissioners approved the project during a meeting Wednesday night. Eighty townhomes will be built near the micro-hospital. Some residents at the meeting expressed concerns about ambulance noise, traffic and stormwater runoff. ChristianaCare "I have mixed feelings about it," Gary Lockman from Springfield said. "Generally, I'm in favor of it. I think we need it. I know it doesn't replace the hospitals that have closed." The micro-hospital won't be as large as a full-scale hospital, but ChristianaCare said it will include 10 inpatient beds with an emergency room equipped to handle heart attacks, strokes, injuries and falls. Springfield solicitor Jim Byrne said the project will create jobs and generate more than a million dollars every year in tax revenue. "We believe the hospital will take all reasonable steps to minimize any impact on the surrounding residents, but the commissioners have to look at what's best for the whole town," Byrne said. ChristianaCare The new facility will be 2.5 miles from Springfield Hospital, which closed down three years ago. "I think it'll be good because we seem to be running out of hospitals with the closing of Crozer," Mike Whelan from Springfield said. The Springfield micro-hospital is set to open in late 2026. ChristianaCare's micro-hospital in Aston is set to open in late 2026 to early 2027.

Wall Street Journal
44 minutes ago
- Wall Street Journal
Landmark House v. NCAA Settlement Approved by Judge, Allowing Colleges to Pay Athletes
A federal judge in California finally approved a $2.6 billion settlement for college athletes that upends a century-old tenet of college sports—the notion that schools cannot pay the athletes that play for them. U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken on Friday ushered in a new era—a professional era—for college sports by signing off on a plan for the NCAA and the five most prominent sports conferences to settle a class-action lawsuit with current and former college players. The deal will give backpay to some, as well as creating a system in which each Division I school will be able to distribute roughly $20 million a year to their athletes. Schools are poised to begin implementing the new model this fall. The decision has been months in the making, drawn out in its final weeks by the judge's insistence that the NCAA find a way to stop current athletes from losing their roster spots. The settlement would 'enable NCAA schools to share their athletic revenues with Division I college student-athletes for the first time in the history of the NCAA,' Wilken wrote in her 76-page opinion. She added that it was 'expected to open the door for Division I student- athletes to receive, in the aggregate, approximately $1.6 billion dollars in new compensation and benefits per year, with that amount increasing over the next ten years.' Each school that elects to share revenue with athletes will start by distributing more than $20 million in the coming academic year. That amount will reach about $32.9 million per school by 2034-35, the end of the injunctive-relief settlement, Wilken wrote. The settlement brings the biggest changes yet to college sports, which until recently had banned athletes from earning much more than a scholarship, room and board. It comes on the heels of years of upheaval that have included loosened restrictions on off-the-field compensation for players, liberalized transfer rules and blockbuster television deals for schools and the chaotic conference realignment that followed. Yet during all of that time, many college sports leaders had still resisted paying athletes directly from the billions of dollars in revenue they helped generate. Now, that restraint is off. Schools have been readying for months for the settlement effects to land on their athletic departments, most immediately by transforming how they recruit and manage rosters in football and basketball. 'People have been doing a lot of work on a contingent basis to try to create the infrastructure that's envisioned by the settlement,' NCAA President Charlie Baker said ahead of the final approval. 'It'll definitely be rocky and kind of messy coming out of the gate, because big things are that way.' Private equity has already been circling college sports, pledging to inject capital into schools but also to advise them on how to grow their sports business. And athletic departments are openly wrestling over what the ruling means for the future of Olympic sports on campus. Most of these sports do not generate much revenue, but American campuses serve as the primary Olympic training ground for Team USA. The settlement largely immunizes the NCAA against similar claims, a provision the association considered essential as it seeks to move past decades of court battles over payments for players. But it will almost certainly not end litigation over the shape of college sports. It isn't clear whether the money needs to be distributed equitably in accordance with Title IX, the federal statute that requires publicly funded institutions to provide equal opportunities to male and female athletes. Aside from preparing for schools to distribute roughly $20 million a year to athletes, the settlement didn't specify how exactly much should be allocated to each sport. The majority will likely go to football, the financial engine of most athletic departments, as well as men's basketball. Female athletes have raised questions over the payouts they are set to receive and what fair compensation looks like for them going forward. 'This settlement doesn't come close to recognizing the value I lost,' LSU gymnast Livvy Dunne said in an unsuccessful attempt to object to the settlement. There's also the open question of whether athletes getting paid by their institutions are working for them—a distinction that could open up schools to more legal challenges. But even without employee status, the settlement will transform the relationship between players and schools. Write to Louise Radnofsky at Laine Higgins at and Rachel Bachman at