As a child, Nicholas T. Hertz spent much of his time exploring outdoors and wondering what the world around him was made of. That curiosity followed him into the classroom. In eighth grade, for example, he created a model of a mitochondrion for a school project. The habit of looking closely and asking questions stayed with him as he went on to study biochemistry, pursue his Ph.D. at UCSF, and eventually build biotech companies around difficult scientific questions.

In this conversation, Nick, now Founder & CEO of Montara Therapeutics, looks back on his path from scientist to entrepreneur, the lessons he has learned from building two biotech companies, and why he continues to revisit therapeutic ideas the field once set aside. His perspective brings a client’s voice to The People Behind the Science series and reflects something we have seen throughout BioDuro’s 30 years: meaningful progress often begins with a difficult question and people willing to work through it together.

Looking back on your career so far, what has most shaped you as a scientist and biotech founder?

My path has been shaped by a belief that the things we call undruggable are rarely truly impossible. They are usually just waiting for someone to approach them differently. Bacterial infections were a death sentence until antibiotics. KRAS, a driver of some of the deadliest cancers, was dismissed as undruggable for three decades until Kevan Shokat proved otherwise. What has always drawn me is that gap between what looks impossible today and what patients actually need.

It is why I moved from the bench into building companies. During my PhD at UCSF, I discovered a new class of molecules targeting Parkinson’s disease, and rather than watch that science stall, I co-founded my first company, Mitokinin, to translate it. That work was ultimately acquired by AbbVie, and it taught me that conviction and clarity of purpose matter as much as scientific rigor.

That same conviction is what brought Kevan and me together to found Montara and take on the brain, still one of the hardest frontiers in medicine. Rather than fighting the blood-brain barrier, we use it: a two-drug combination that keeps a therapy active in the brain and switches it off everywhere else, and because the design is modular, it is a platform for creating many new brain medicines rather than a single drug. Through all of it, the patients waiting for these treatments have been the most reliable compass I have.

After founding two biotech companies, what have you come to see as most important in building a company?

The most important lesson is to be honest about what you do not know, and to build a team that fills those gaps. Biotech is humbling. The science will surprise you, the timelines will challenge you, and the fundraising will test you. What separates successful ventures is not the absence of those obstacles but the discipline to work through them without losing sight of the science or the patients.

For us, that discipline lives in focus. Capital efficiency is not a constraint; it is a strategy that forces you to run only the experiments that genuinely change the value of the company. Just as important are the people around you. The right investors, CROs, CDMOs, and advisors do not simply execute; they make the science better. No one builds a company like this alone, and the best founders spend as much energy choosing their partners as they do designing their experiments.

What led you to found Montara, and how would you describe the company’s approach to brain-targeted drug development?

Montara began with a specific scientific observation. mTOR is one of the most well-validated targets in all of neuroscience, with a role in epilepsy, neurodegeneration, and brain development. Yet for decades its therapeutic potential has been held back by the toxicities of shutting mTOR down throughout the body. The biology was never in doubt. The tolerability was, and much of the field moved on.

We asked a simple question: what if you could deliver the benefit of mTOR inhibition only to the brain, and leave the rest of the body untouched? That is the idea behind our BrainOnly platform. It is not a new target. It is a smarter way to reach it.

Medicine has used this logic before in narrow cases, pairing levodopa with carbidopa in Parkinson’s, or combining the two components of Cobenfy in schizophrenia. What makes Montara different is that our approach is modular and target-agnostic. Instead of inventing a bespoke combination for a single disease, we have one peripheral blocker that can be paired with many brain-active drugs. That is what turns a single medicine into a platform.

What makes CNS drug development particularly challenging, and how is Montara applying its BrainOnly platform to TSC-related epilepsy?

The hardest problem in CNS drug development often is not finding the right target. It is getting the right drug to the brain without causing harm everywhere else. BrainOnly solves this with a two-drug combination. We pair everolimus, a generic and well-understood mTOR inhibitor, with MT1110, our proprietary peripheral blocker. MT1110 saturates the drug’s binding partner, FKBP12, throughout the body, but it is designed not to cross the blood-brain barrier. Everolimus therefore stays active in the brain, precisely where it is needed, and is switched off everywhere else.

In TSC-related epilepsy, where a genetic mutation drives mTOR hyperactivation, that difference is profound. Today, roughly 95% of patients on everolimus experience at least one adverse event, and those immunosuppressive and metabolic toxicities cap the dose a child can tolerate. In preclinical studies we presented at the American Epilepsy Society meeting, the combination produced greater seizure control than everolimus alone while reducing those side effects. The goal is simple: let physicians’ dose to what a child needs, not to what the body can withstand.

What mattered most to you when choosing a development partner for MT1110?

For a program like MT1110, we needed a partner who could work at the intersection of chemistry, biology, and clinical development, and do it with the agility a small, innovative biotech requires. BioDuro stood out for its scientific depth, its transparency, and, frankly, the quality of its people.

When you are developing something as novel as a two-drug CNS program, there is no playbook. You need a partner that engages with the science rather than just the process, and that tells you the truth quickly when something does not go to plan. Over the course of our collaboration, BioDuro has become far more than a vendor. They are genuinely part of how this program gets built, and that is exactly what a story about the people behind the science should capture.

As you look ahead, what are you most excited about for Montara?

What excites me most is the day we get to put this treatment in the hands of a patient and their family. TSC-related epilepsy is devastating, and the families living with it have waited a long time for something genuinely new. Filing our IND is a milestone, but it is really just the beginning.

Beyond TSC, BrainOnly has the potential to open an entirely new chapter in neurodegenerative disease, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, conditions where mTOR’s role in clearing toxic proteins from the brain is well understood but has never been safely targeted in patients. For the first time, we may be able to test ideas the field set aside years ago, not because they were wrong, but because they were impossible to deliver safely. Being able to do that, on behalf of the people waiting for it, is what gets me out of bed every morning.