The founder and CEO of Flagship Ventures, Noubar Afeyan, points to several reasons why early-stage investing should be on the upswing.

Compound Therapeutics has engineered proteins, called Adzymes, which bind to targets with the specificity of antibodies but unlike them destroy their targets using an attached enzyme.

A preview of the emerging health care companies profiled in the current issue of Start-Up. This month's profile group, Small Size=Big Potential , features profiles of C Sixty Inc., engeneOS Inc., Nanospectra Biosciences Inc. and Oxonica Ltd., Plus these Selected Start-Ups across Health Care: Addiction Therapies Inc., ImpactRx Inc., Ingenium Pharmaceuticals AG and Insulet Corp.

Boston-area start-up engeneOS Inc. aspires to build molecular machines with starting materials that come from nature. The firm aims to take advantage of the the fact that proteins and nucleic acids have evolved highly specific capabilities over thousands of years. Management sees them as components that can be catalogued, combined and harnessed to carry out new tasks.