Seaport Therapeutics, a Boston, MA-based biopharmaceutical company that is developing novel neuropsychiatric medicines, raised $225M in Series B funding.
The round, which brought the total amount to $325M, was led by General Atlantic, with participation from funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Foresite Capital, Invus, Goldman Sachs Alternatives, CPP Investments, and other new investors.
Seaport Therapeutics is an entity founded by PureTech Health plc (Nasdaq: PRTC, LSE: PRTC), a clinical-stage biotherapeutics company. Following the Series B financing, PureTech will hold equity ownership in Seaport of 36.7% on a diluted basis.
The company intends to use the funds to advance its clinical-stage pipeline of first and best-in-class medicines through important clinical milestones as well as further advance the capabilities of the Glyph™ technology platform.
Led by CEO and Founder Daphne Zohar, Seaport Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company advancing the development of novel neuropsychiatric medicines in areas of high unmet patient needs. The company has a proven strategy of advancing clinically validated mechanisms previously held back by limitations that are overcome with its proprietary Glyph technology platform. All the therapeutic candidates in its pipeline of medicines are based on it, which is designed to enable oral bioavailability, bypass first-pass metabolism and reduce liver enzyme elevations or hepatotoxicity and other side effects.
The most advanced therapeutic candidate in the pipeline is SPT-300, an oral prodrug of allopregnanolone that is being advanced into a Phase 2b study for major depressive disorder with or without anxious distress that has the potential to be registration-enabling. Allopregnanolone is an endogenous neurosteroid with clinically validated rapid anti-depressant and anxiolytic activity, and SPT-300 retains this activity in an oral form.
SPT-320, a novel prodrug of agomelatine being advanced into Phase 1 studies for the treatment of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), has the potential to be the first new mechanism for GAD in decades. SPT-320 uses Glyph to bypass liver first-pass metabolism and thus has the potential to lower the dose and reduce liver exposure while retaining efficacious systemic exposure of agomelatine that has been validated in multiple clinical studies in GAD.
FinSMEs
21/10/2024