Cerevance Closes $45 Million Series B Financing

Proceeds to Fund a Diverse Pipeline of Therapeutics Acting on Novel Targets for Brain Diseases

Boston, 14 April 2020 – Cerevance, a private drug discovery and development company focused on brain diseases, has closed a Series B financing, bringing in $45 million from new investors including GV (formerly Google Ventures), Bill Gates and Foresite Capital, as well as all of the company’s previous investors, which include Takeda Ventures, Inc., the corporate venture arm of Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, Ltd., the Dementia Discovery Fund and Lightstone Ventures.

Cerevance will use the proceeds of the financing to continue identifying novel therapeutic targets for central nervous system diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, by transcriptionally and epigenetically profiling specific neuronal and glial cell populations in thousands of post-mortem human brain tissue samples and advancing a diverse portfolio of therapeutic programs against them.

“Cerevance has a differentiated approach to neurotherapeutics and continues to apply its powerful NETSseq platform to central nervous system diseases,” said David Schenkein, M.D., General Partner at GV. “With exceptional science, a strong sense of urgency and a leadership team that has previously succeeded together in drug discovery, Cerevance is well-positioned to deliver life-changing therapeutics for patients with brain diseases.”

“It’s hard to imagine a more stellar group of investors supporting us,” said Brad Margus, chief executive officer of Cerevance. “We look forward to drawing on their expertise in deep data analysis and therapeutic development as we mine our unique biological data sets to advance new, desperately needed therapies for brain diseases.”

About Cerevance

Cerevance, a private, clinical-stage pharmaceutical company focused on brain diseases, is applying a new technology, called NETSseq, to reveal transcriptional and epigenetic differences between specific cell types in mature human brains. NETSseq profiles neuronal and glial cell populations at depths not possible with other approaches, generating unprecedented data sets and insights. The company has thus far partnered with 14 brain banks around the world to assemble a growing collection of more than 7,000 clinically annotated, human brain tissue samples from healthy and diseased donors spanning nine decades in age. By applying NETSseq to specific cell types critical to circuits disrupted by disease and comparing vulnerable and resilient cell populations, Cerevance’s scientists have begun identifying targets and advancing a pipeline of novel therapeutics that modulate them for CNS diseases.

Read more