Cerevance Expands Series B Financing to $65 Million

Cerevance, a private drug discovery and development company focused on brain diseases, has expanded its Series B financing round, adding $20 million to the $45 million that it announced in April. With this second closing, UPMC Enterprises, Casdin Capital and Dolby Family Ventures joined the company’s investor base, while Foresite Capital added to its investment made in the first closing. Cerevance’s previous closing also included GV (formerly Google Ventures), Bill Gates, Takeda Ventures, Inc., the Dementia Discovery Fund and Lightstone Ventures.

“Cerevance uses its powerful NETSseq platform to uncover drivers of disease and aging in a unique tissue collection of 8,000 human brain samples,” said Matthias Kleinz, Ph.D., Vice President of Translational Programs at UPMC Enterprises, who will be joining Cerevance’s Board of Directors. “This has enabled Cerevance to discover entirely novel drugs and targets that could transform the treatment of patients with a range of CNS diseases. We are excited to work with the team at Cerevance to support this ground-breaking discovery effort, which aligns with critical clinical, research and investment focus areas for UPMC.”

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.

“It’s gratifying to see such strong investor enthusiasm for our unique target discovery platform and emerging therapeutic pipeline,” said Robert Middlebrook, chief financial officer of Cerevance. “This capital will allow us to move quickly in advancing novel approaches to diseases with significant unmet medical need.”

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