BlackThorn Therapeutics, a San Francisco, California-based clinical-stage, neurobehavioral health company pioneering next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to advance targeted therapeutics, closed a $76m Series B financing.
New investors, including Polaris Partners, Premier Partners, Scripps Research, and Vertex Ventures HC joined the round, along with existing investors Alexandria Venture Investments, Altitude Life Science Ventures, ARCH Venture Partners, Biomatics Capital, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JJDC, Inc. (JJDC), and Mercury Fund.
In connection with the financing, Brian Chee, a managing partner at Polaris Partners, Lori Hu, a managing director at Vertex Ventures HC, and Julie Sunderland, a managing director at Biomatics Capital joined BlackThorn’s board as directors.
Led by Bill Martin, Ph.D., president and chief operating officer, BlackThorn Therapeutics is a clinical-stage neurobehavioral health company pioneering the next generation of artificial intelligence technologies to advance its pipeline of targeted therapeutics for treating brain disorders. The company has engineered PathFinder™, a cloud-based computational psychiatry and data platform, to enable the collection, integration and analysis of multimodal data at speed and scale.
BlackThorn applies its data-driven approaches to create an understanding of the core underlying pathophysiology of neurobehavioral disorders and uses these insights to generate objective neuromarkers, which support drug target identification, patient stratification and objective clinical trial endpoints.
By identifying more homogenous patient subgroups who share underlying neurobiology, BlackThorn aims to direct its drug candidates to neurobiologically-defined patient populations most likely to respond.
The company also announced two appointments to its executive management team:
– Jane Tiller, MBChB, FRCPsych, as chief medical officer, and
– Laura Hansen, Ph.D., as vice president, corporate affairs.
FinSMEs
13/06/2019