Seaport Therapeutics, a Boston, MA-based clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, raised $100M in Series A funding.
The round was co-led by Arch Venture Partners and Sofinnova Investments along with Third Rock Ventures and Seaport founder PureTech Health.
The company intends to use the funds for the rapid advancement of its clinical-stage pipeline of medicines as well as further development of the Glyph platform.
Led by Daphne Zohar, Founder and CEO, Seaport Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company advancing the development of novel neuropsychiatric medicines in areas of patient needs. It has a proven strategy of advancing clinically validated mechanisms with its proprietary Glyph™ technology platform, which is designed to enable oral bioavailability, bypass first-pass metabolism and reduce hepatotoxicity and other side effects.
Seaport’s most advanced therapeutic candidate is SPT-300, which is an oral prodrug of allopregnanolone, an endogenous neurosteroid, in development for the treatment of anxious depression. Allopregnanolone has demonstrated therapeutic benefit in a range of neuropsychiatric conditions, but it is only approved as an intravenous infusion, which has limited the scope of its clinical use. Using the Glyph platform, SPT-300 retains the activity and potency of endogenous allopregnanolone in an oral form and has the potential to capture the breadth of the natural biological response. In a Phase 2a clinical trial, SPT-300 demonstrated proof-of-concept in a validated clinical model of anxiety in healthy volunteers.
Seaport’s pipeline also includes SPT-320, a novel prodrug of agomelatine being advanced for the treatment of Generalized Anxiety Disorder, which uses the Glyph platform to bypass first-pass metabolism by the liver and thus has the potential to lower its effective dose, reduce liver exposure and eliminate the need for liver function monitoring that has held back agomelatine. SPT-348, a prodrug of a non-hallucinogenic neuroplastogen in development for the treatment of mood and other neuropsychiatric disorders, leverages Glyph to create a potential first-in-class treatment with improved pharmacokinetics and tolerability compared to conventional psychedelics. Beyond these programs, Seaport has multiple discovery and preclinical programs underway.
Seaport also announced the appointment of Daphne Zohar as Founder, Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors, and Steven M. Paul, M.D., as Founder and Chair of the Board of Directors. The additional members joining the Seaport Board of Directors are Robert Nelsen (Managing Partner and Co-founder of ARCH Venture Partners), James Healy, M.D., Ph.D. (Managing Partner of Sofinnova Investments), Eric Elenko, Ph.D. (Co-founder and President of PureTech and Co-inventor of KarXT), and Bharatt Chowrira Ph.D., (newly appointed Chief Executive Officer of PureTech). Courtney Wallace (Venture Partner at Third Rock Ventures) is joining as Board Observer.
FinSMEs
10/04/2024