For those living with type 1 diabetes, a disease that occurs when the body’s own immune system attacks the pancreas, life involves daily insulin shots and constant blood sugar monitoring. There is only disease management, no disease cure.

A unique combination of stakeholders hopes to change that and speed a broad spectrum of innovative therapies. JDRF, formerly known as the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, has made an initial investment of $5 million into a newly formed PureTech Ventures entity, T1D Innovations, that ultimately plans to raise $30 million to create and provide seed funding to startups developing innovative therapies for type 1 diabetes. Other companies, non-profit disease foundations, and investors will contribute the remaining $25 million.

While the disease focus is type 1 diabetes, the drug development focus of T1D is to bridge the valley of death, that stage in development when promising companies have moved beyond credit cards, grants, and angel investors but are not quite ready for series A venture funding.

“It’s really to lower the activation energy of getting these things out of academia and out of the realm of more basic research into that translational development pipeline,” says David Steinberg, a PureTech partner and T1D’s initial CEO. “We’ve developed a unique financial, legal, and entrepreneurial framework to foster innovation” to create and fund companies developing type 1 diabetes-related therapies.

The partnership will allow the non-profit JDRF a way to share the risk of translational research and hopefully its reward, allowing it “to drive the most commercially promising type 1 diabetes research projects into the clinic while leveraging the co-investment of other partners,” says JDRF President and CEO Jeffrey Brewer.

The collaboration brings something else to JDRF, the leading global organization funding type 1 diabetes research. JDRF’s grants typically focus on early stage exploratory research and its industry partnering activities focus on later stage product development opportunities. By supporting company formation around type 1 diabetes research, it adds translational research to its own portfolio of activities.

PureTech will combine JDRF’s investment with funds raised from additional not-for-profit, strategic, and financial investors, to create a capital pool for distribution to promising companies. Investors that come on board in the future will also participate in any financial returns. Founding partners Joslin Diabetes Center and the T1D Exchange will contribute scientific, clinical, and patient engagement expertise to the collaboration.