US-based brain disease treatment developer Cerevance added $20m yesterday to increase a series B round featuring pharmaceutical firm Takeda and internet and technology group Alphabet to $65m.
UPMC Enterprises, the commercialisation arm of University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, provided the extra funding along with Dolby Family Ventures, Foresite Capital and Casdin Capital.
The April 2020 first close featured Alphabet subsidiary GV and Takeda investment vehicle Takeda Ventures in addition to Foresite Capital, Lightstone Ventures, Bill Gates and Dementia Discovery Fund (DDF) a strategic investment fund backed by several pharmaceutical companies.
Founded in 2016, Cerevance is progressing medical treatments for central nervous system (CNS) diseases it identifies using a discovery platform called NetsSeq, which holds clinical annotations for more than 8,000 human brain tissue samples.
The company’s lead program, CVN424, entered phase 2 clinical trials for Parkinson’s disease in late 2019. The series B cash will fund development of treatments for CNS indications such as Alzheimer’s disease, leveraging NetsSeq to home in on specific varieties of affected neuronal and non-neuronal cells.
Matthias Kleinz, vice-president of translational programs at UPMC Enterprises, will be joining Cerevance’s board of directors following the round’s second close. It has now raised $106m in combined equity and grant financing.
Dementia Discovery Fund supplied $5m to close Ceverance’s series A round at $26.5m in 2017. Lightstone Ventures had led the $21.5m first tranche the year before, investing together with Takeda.
The original version of this story appeared on our sister site, Global University Venturing.