- Clinical-stage neurobehavioral health company BlackThorn Therapeutics announced it raised $76 million in Series B funding
BlackThorn Therapeutics is a clinical-stage neurobehavioral health company that is pioneering next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to advance targeted therapeutics.
Recently, the company announced it raised $76 million in Series B funding from new investors including Polaris Partners, Premier Partners, Scripps Research, and Vertex Ventures HC. And 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 also joined the round.
“BlackThorn was founded to bring new therapies to patients by applying advances in computational sciences to address patient heterogeneity, one of the biggest historical challenges in the field of neuropsychiatric drug development,” said BlackThorn’s president and chief operating officer Bill Martin, PhD. “Three years later, insights from our data-driven approaches are yielding patient enrichment strategies that could increase the probability of clinical trial success and improve patient outcomes. We are grateful for our investors’ support to continue advancing our platform and therapeutic pipeline as we build out a world-class team at the intersection of technology and clinical neuroscience.”
In conjunction with this round of funding, Polaris Partners managing partner Brian Chee, Vertex Ventures HC managing director Lori Hu, and Biomatics Capital managing director Julie Sunderland is joining BlackThorn’s board as directors.
“Making personalized medicine for mental health a reality requires the ability to gather, integrate and analyze a wide variety of data at scale,” added Paul Berns — the Executive Chair of BlackThorn and a Venture Partner at ARCH Venture Partners. “BlackThorn has positioned itself at the forefront of these efforts by building the largest library of deeply phenotyped clinical neurobiological data and a cloud-based platform powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to inform rational, targeted drug discovery and development.”
BlackThorn also made two appointments to its executive management team including Jane Tiller FRCPsych (MD), MBA, MPhil as chief medical officer. And Laura (Fredericksen) Hansen, SPHR was brought on as VP of corporate affairs. Dr. Tiller brings extensive clinical psychiatry and drug development experience as recently being the head of European markets, Australia and Canada at Bristol Myers Squibb and will lead the company’s clinical and regulatory efforts. And Dr. Hansen is going to bring extensive strategic communications experience to the company as she was VP of investor relations at Aimmune Therapeutics prior to this role.
“I am thrilled to join BlackThorn particularly at this time when the nexus between artificial intelligence and the latest advances in neuroscience promises to modernize the way we understand and treat behavioral disorders,” explained Dr. Tiller.
