A patient comes home from a routine surgery and can't follow a recipe. A cancer survivor finishes chemotherapy and realizes she can't focus through a meeting she used to lead. A grandfather recovers from a hip replacement and slowly loses the threads of conversation at his own dinner table.

Each of them is told some version of the same thing: it's stress, it's age, it's normal, it'll pass.

It often doesn't.

The conditions have names

Cognitive decline triggered by surgery is called postoperative cognitive dysfunction (POCD). The version triggered by chemotherapy is called chemotherapy-induced cognitive impairment (CICI) — or, more colloquially, chemobrain.

Both are real, named medical conditions. Both are common — and the numbers are larger than most clinicians acknowledge.

Depending on the complexity of the surgery, up to 25–30% of patients over 65 experience POCD. With more than 19 million surgeries performed on elderly patients in the U.S. each year, that's millions of cases annually.

Estimates for CICI vary, but most experts agree that at least one in three — and possibly as many as 75% — of patients on chemotherapy experience some degree of cognitive impairment. With over two million new cancer diagnoses in the U.S. each year, and half of those patients receiving chemotherapy, the scope is staggering.

There are no approved treatments for either condition.

Why this has been neglected

The honest answer: these conditions are hard to study, hard to measure, and easy to dismiss.

Cognitive impairment after surgery or chemotherapy gets absorbed into "recovery" and assumed to resolve on its own. When it doesn't, it gets attributed to age or treatment-related fatigue. Patients learn to stop bringing it up. Clinicians, lacking treatment options, have little reason to formally diagnose what they can't address. Researchers run into measurement challenges and funding gaps. The space has been left open.

That's the gap Nulyn Science was built to close.

The science: a treatable mechanism

POCD and CICI are not mysterious. The leading hypothesis — supported by a growing body of preclinical and clinical evidence — is that both are driven by a neuroinflammatory cascade.

Surgery and chemotherapy each trigger a systemic inflammatory response. That response releases cytokines — signaling proteins like TNF-α — that can cross the blood-brain barrier and activate microglia, the brain's resident immune cells. When microglia stay activated for too long, they disrupt the function of nearby neurons. Memory, attention, and executive function are among the first capacities to suffer.

If you can interrupt that cascade — particularly at the moment of the inflammatory insult — you may be able to prevent the cognitive decline that follows.

Our approach: an approved drug, repurposed

NS-001, our lead asset, is a small organic molecule with a long, well-documented safety record. It is currently approved globally for an unrelated indication, and Nulyn's COO led its original development before its Phase 3 trials and market approval.

What is new is what we have discovered about how it works in the brain.

NS-001 is a potent, brain-penetrant inhibitor of the inflammatory cytokines implicated in POCD and CICI. In our preclinical work, a single preoperative dose in mice significantly improved cognitive performance in behavioral testing — and biochemical analysis confirmed reduced microglial activation both six hours and eight days post-operation. A second study in rats, using a doxorubicin model of CICI, produced comparable behavioral and biochemical results.

Because NS-001 is already approved, with a known safety and tolerability profile, we can pursue the FDA's 505(b)(2) regulatory pathway — moving directly into Phase 2 trials in our target populations. That meaningfully reduces both the time and the capital required to bring a treatment to patients.

This is the core of our strategy: drug repurposing as a way to shorten the path between a promising mechanism and a treatment patients can actually access.

The team

Nulyn Science was co-founded by Dr. André Ulmann, a pioneering pharmaceutical entrepreneur best known as the founder of HRA Pharma, where he developed and brought to market the first emergency contraceptive; and Arnold Newman, a serial inventor whose career began at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and includes the original development of NS-001 itself.

They are joined by Dr. Vincent Degos, a leading neuro-anesthesiologist and professor at Sorbonne Université, whose research has helped define how systemic immune insults — surgery, anesthesia, chemotherapy — contribute to long-term cognitive impairment in vulnerable populations. Dr. Degos spent his post-doctoral years at UCSF, where he co-authored extensively with Dr. Mervyn Maze, one of the foundational figures in POCD research.

Antoine Karsenty leads the company's operations and strategy.

What's next

We have submitted our pre-IND package to the FDA, outlining a Phase 2 trial in POCD planned for the second half of 2026 in Brazil. Our partners on the ground include a leading clinical research organization in Rio and the National Institute of Orthopedics, both selected for their capacity to deliver rapid, high-quality patient recruitment in our target population.

A second Phase 2 program — this one in CICI — is planned to begin by the end of 2026.

In parallel, we are advancing two preclinical programs, including a combination therapy approach to Alzheimer's disease, and continuing to expand our network of clinical and research collaborators.

Get involved

If you're a researcher whose work touches POCD, CICI, neuroinflammation, or perioperative cognition — we would welcome a conversation.

If you're an investor with an interest in capital-efficient, de-risked development of treatments for serious unmet needs — same.

And if you're a patient, a caregiver, or a clinician who has lived with these conditions and wants to follow our progress — we would be glad to have you along.

You can reach us at hello@nulynscience.com.