Quartet Medicine, a US-based developer of treatments for chronic pain and inflammation, has raised $17m in a series A round from a consortium including pharmaceutical firms Novartis and Pfizer.
Novartis Venture Funds, Pfizer Venture Investment and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital-funded Partners Innovation Fund all participated as new investors. Henry Skinner from Novartis Venture Funds has joined Quartet’s board.
Venture capital firm Atlas Venture led the round, having provided the seed money in late 2013 to launch Quartet out of research by scientists at Boston Children’s Hospital and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.
Bruce Booth, chairman of Quartet and partner at Atlas Venture, said: “We are capitalising on recent advances in human genetics that are revealing new mechanisms and, ultimately, novel targets for drug discovery and development in the challenging and underserved therapeutic area of chronic pain.”