Seed spherical led by SV Well being and Two Bear Capital will fund strategy aiming to deal with dose-limiting unwanted side effects in neurological therapies.
Montara Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical firm targeted on growing safer and simpler neuroscience medicine, has introduced it has closed its $8 million seed spherical. The financing, which was led by SV Well being Buyers’ Dementia Discovery Fund and co-led by Two Bear Capital, additionally noticed participation from Dolby Household Ventures and KdT Ventures. The funds will assist the development of Montara’s BrainOnly platform, a expertise designed to mitigate peripheral unwanted side effects by concentrating drug exercise solely throughout the mind.
Neurological ailments similar to Alzheimer’s illness, Parkinson’s illness, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and varied mind cancers signify among the most urgent unmet medical wants worldwide. The worldwide burden of those situations continues to escalate, exacerbated by an absence of efficient and well-tolerated therapies. A major problem on this area lies in growing therapies that may cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and successfully goal illness websites with out inflicting dose-limiting peripheral unwanted side effects – a difficulty that has rendered many potential therapies undruggable.
Montara’s BrainOnly platform addresses this challenge by using a two-component system: a brain-penetrant, target-specific drug paired with a peripheral blocker that forestalls the drug’s exercise outdoors the mind. This modern strategy is knowledgeable by pioneering analysis from the Shokat Lab on the College of California, San Francisco (UCSF), which has been revealed in Nature. Montara’s expertise, solely licensed from UCSF, goals to supply a flexible resolution relevant to each present and novel small molecule inhibitors and activators.
Dr Nicholas T Hertz, Founder and CEO of Montara, remarked on the potential affect of their work: “The unmet wants of sufferers with neurodegenerative and neurologic ailments and mind cancers are staggering. It’s nicely understood that uncontrolled peripheral unwanted side effects or toxicities related to brain-targeting medicine are sometimes the barrier to promising therapies. We hope to remove this impediment with our BrainOnly platform, unlocking many beforehand undruggable neurological targets and delivering a brand new era of neuroscience medicine that deliver hope to sufferers and their households.”
The seed funding will allow Montara to progress its preliminary inner pipeline, which features a neurological disease-targeting drug with recognized medical advantages however extreme peripheral unwanted side effects. Along with supporting the event of this therapeutic, the funds will facilitate chemistry efforts on additional applications geared toward treating Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s illness. The funding additionally sees the addition of Dirk Landgraf, PhD, Principal at SV and J Seth Strattan, PhD, Basic Associate at Two Bear Capital, to Montara’s Board of Administrators. Landgraf expressed his enthusiasm, commenting: “Montara’s strategy is differentiated because it prompts the drug within the mind as a substitute of utilizing two medicine with counteracting results on the identical goal or pathway. Its mission to develop a brain-only pharmacology platform has big potential to deliver safer and simpler therapies to sufferers affected by mind issues.”
Montara Therapeutics was based in 2023 by Hertz, alongside scientific co-founders Professors Kevan Shokat, Thomas Südhof and Martin Kampmann. The corporate leverages the in depth experience of its founders, together with Shokat’s work on covalent inhibition to focus on KRAS G12C, a beforehand undruggable goal, and Südhof’s Nobel Prize-winning analysis on vesicle trafficking. This crew, coupled with a strategic collaboration with the Dementia Discovery Fund, positions Montara as a big participant on the neurological therapeutics panorama.
