Neuron23 announced today that it closed a $100 million Series C financing round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
Neuron23 announced Wednesday the closing of a $100 million Series C financing round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The company, which develops precision medicines for neuroimmunological diseases, also nominated NEU-723 as a clinical candidate for Parkinson’s Disease (PD).
The closing of Series C brings Neuron23’s total funding raised to date to $213.5 million. The company stated that this financing round represents a strong endorsement of its approach to precision neurology.
“It’s a really great addition to our war chest where we can expand a number of efforts to build out our precision medicine platform that will apply to our therapeutic candidates,” Neuron23 CEO Nancy Stagliano, Ph.D. said in an interview with BioSpace. “This will allow us to hire staff to support that area and grow our clinical development organization as well as continue to expand our biology and chemistry capabilities. We will be able to take the LRRK2 molecule forward into clinical development.”
To that end, NEU-723 is a best-in-class brain-penetrant leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2) inhibitor that the company has nominated as a clinical candidate for Parkinson’s treatment. Variants of the LRRK2 gene are the most common mutations found in inherited PD and there is evidence that LRRK2 activity may play a role in people with non-familial PD.
Parkinson’s Disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects movement through the loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra, an area of the brain associated with reward and movement. An estimated one million people are living with PD in the United States, which is expected to rise to 1.2 million by 2030. LRRK2 inhibitors are thought to be neuroprotective and prevent the loss of dopaminergic neurons.
“LRRK2 has been a target of high biology and industry interest for a long time. What we’ve done is work very hard to inhibit LRRK2 kinase and the kinase activity as increased kinase activity is associated with increased risk of Parkinson’s,” Stagliano stated.
Neuron23 has used a patient stratification approach using machine learning to identify the subset of patients with genetic variations who might benefit from LRRK2 inhibitor therapeutics. The company also intends to develop a companion diagnostic test for PD patients to understand which patients have genetic mutations that might make them primed for certain types of therapies.
Stagliano said the company plans to begin a clinical trial of NEU-723 in healthy volunteers later this year to study the safety and tolerability of the therapeutic with the intent to transition into testing PD patients with LRRK2 mutations both familial and non-familial.
Beyond its PD candidate, Neuron23 also has a high-profile second program utilizing tyrosine kinase 2 (TYK2), a Janus kinase (JAK) protein that plays a role in pathological immune signaling. There are genetic linkages to TYK2 in a number of autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis (MS), a disease in which the immune system targets the myelin sheath of neurons.
Neuron23 is working on a central TYK2 inhibitor to treat MS utilizing the same machine learning platform as it did for LRRK2 in the treatment of PD. Stagliano emphasized that current therapeutic candidates targeting TYK2 are systemically restricted and cannot penetrate the brain, making their candidates unique.
The company has big goals to fill unmet needs in the neuroimmunological field.
“For us, the mission of the company is to bring precision medicine strategies to all our therapeutic candidates. We’ve learned a lot from the oncology field as to how they’ve successfully deployed companion diagnostics and precision medicine to cancer therapies, but it has not been successfully employed in neuroimmunology to date. Neurodegenerative diseases are extremely heterogeneous, and it is clear to everyone working in the space that one drug will not address all mechanisms in all patients,” Stagliano said in closing. “We want to change that narrative. We want to make sure that when folks are studying diseases like Parkinson’s and MS that we look at each patient and obtain the right drugs and the right signature for each patient.”
