Jens Eckstein

Dr. Jens Eckstein is a life-science investor and company builder with more than 25 years in biopharma venture capital and roughly a decade of operational experience in drug discovery and development. He earned a Diploma in Chemistry from the University of Konstanz (1987) and a Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry from Harvard University (1991), and is a Kauffman Fellow and a member of the EU-sponsored Gold Track Expert Council.

His most prominent prior role was President of SR One, GlaxoSmithKline's corporate venture fund, where he spent roughly eight years. Under his leadership the SR One team deployed over $500 million and was involved in 18 IPOs — including CRISPR Therapeutics, Turning Point (TP) Therapeutics, and Principia Biopharma — as well as 12 M&A transactions. He was also co-founder and Managing Director of Action Potential Venture Capital (APVC), a pioneering fund for bioelectronic medicines, and earlier a general partner in TVM Capital's Boston life-sciences practice focused on early-stage investing.

In 2019 he joined Apollo Health Ventures as Managing Partner. Apollo is an early-stage transatlantic life-science fund investing exclusively in breakthrough therapeutics arising from the biology of aging; in December 2021 it closed a $180 million (€157.5M) second fund to back data-driven biotech and health-tech ventures targeting age-related disease. At Apollo he was a prolific venture builder, holding the chairmanship or board seat of multiple portfolio companies. He is now listed as an Advisory Board member at Apollo.

More recently, Dr. Eckstein became an Investment Partner at the Hevolution Foundation, a Riyadh-headquartered, Saudi-backed global non-profit with an annual budget of up to $1 billion — one of the largest funders of healthy-aging and geroscience research and translation worldwide.

• Invests at seed and early stage, and frequently as a venture creator — co-founding and building companies rather than only writing passive checks.
• Core thesis is the biology of aging: backing breakthrough therapeutics and platforms that target aging pathways (autophagy, mitophagy, senescence) to treat age-related disease and extend healthspan.
• Favors data-driven, deeply science-led teams — companies translating rigorous academic biology into drug-discovery programs.
• Geographic focus is transatlantic (Europe + US), reflecting Apollo's Berlin/Luxembourg/Boston footprint.
• On the Vandria investment he framed deals around alignment with "Hevolution's mission to fund innovations in healthy aging" — a signal that mission fit with longevity/healthspan science is a gating criterion.