USA – Cerevance, a Boston, MA-based private, clinical-stage drug discovery and development company, announced an expansion of its Series B funding round with an additional close of $51m, bringing the total Series B financing to $116m.
Backers included Gates Frontier, Dementia Discovery Fund, Foresite Capital, GV (Google Ventures), Lightstone Ventures, Takeda Ventures, UPMC Enterprises and Dolby Family Ventures. The financing will support upcoming clinical trials focused on Parkinson’s disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), and schizophrenia.Led by Craig Thompson, chief executive officer, Cerevance is focused on developing novel therapeutics for central nervous system (CNS) diseases using its proprietary Nuclear Enriched Transcript Sort sequencing (NETSseq) platform. The company has a pipeline of clinical and preclinical programs developed using its proprietary NETSseq platform to discover and validate novel therapeutic targets in some of the most challenging neurological diseases. Recent and upcoming milestones include:The company’s earlier-stage pipeline includes multiple first-in-class programs in preclinical development, discovered using the proprietary NETSseq platform to identify highly selectively expressed, novel target proteins that are either specific to certain brain circuits or are over- or under-expressed in diseased brains. Cerevance also has a multi-year strategic research collaboration with Merck, known as MSD outside the United States and Canada, to identify novel targets for Alzheimer’s disease utilizing the NETSseq platform. The company has simultaneously out-licensed one discovery-stage program to Merck as part of the collaboration. In addition, Cerevance also has a research collaboration with Takeda to identify novel target proteins expressed in the CNS to develop new therapies for certain GI disorders.13/02/2023
