Heptares Therapeutics, a Welwyn Garden City-based drug discovery and development company, raised over $21m in a Series B financing.
The round was co-led by the Stanley Family Foundation and existing investor Clarus Ventures, with participation from Takeda Ventures.
The company intends to use the funds to advance a clinical pipeline of novel drugs directed towards clinically validated targets for the treatment of neurological and psychiatric diseases. It is preparing to initiate clinical development for its most advanced programme with a selective M1 muscarinic receptor (clinically validated in the treatment of both Alzheimer’s dementia and cognitive impairment associated with schizophrenia) agonist later this year.
Led by Malcolm Weir, CEO, Heptares creates new medicines targeting clinically GPCRs (G protein-coupled receptors), a family of drug receptors linked to a wide range of human diseases. Leveraging its structure-based drug design technology platform, the company has built a development pipeline of novel drug candidates, which have the potential to treat diseases including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, migraine and diabetes. Pharmaceutical partners include Shire, AstraZeneca, MedImmune, Morphosys, Takeda and Cubist.
FinSMEs
27/06/2013