CraniUS Therapeutics announced it closed a $20 million Series B financing to accelerate development of NeuroPASS, a fully implantable, skull-embedded platform intended to bypass the blood-brain barrier and enable targeted drug delivery and monitoring in the brain.
The Baltimore-based neurotechnology company is developing NeuroPASS as a multi-product platform with an initial roadmap of three complementary products designed to expand therapeutic capability over time. CraniUS said the broader aim is to move cranial implants beyond passive reconstructive hardware toward an active therapeutic interface that can support long-term outpatient care.
Founder Dr. Chad Gordon, a Johns Hopkins neuroplastic surgeon, said the company’s approach was shaped by a recurring clinical challenge: patients with severe neurological disease could not access potentially life-saving therapies because many drugs cannot cross the blood-brain barrier. CraniUS said Gordon has spent more than 15 years studying the temporal cranial space as a site for therapeutic delivery, and founded the company to translate that research into a platform for programmable, long-term access to the brain.
CraniUS said the Series B includes $19 million from private investors and $1 million in non-dilutive funding from the State of Maryland. The round follows the company’s $20 million Series A in 2022, bringing total capital raised to about $40 million. The company said the new financing is expected to support operations into 2027 and fund regulatory submissions, manufacturing scale-up, and product testing as it works toward future commercialization.
CraniUS said it holds 15 issued domestic patents supporting the platform and its long term product roadmap, along with numerous international patents. The company also emphasized that NeuroPASS remains an investigational device not approved or cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for clinical use, and that all described uses remain under development and are subject to regulatory review.
KEY QUOTES
“This is not an incremental advance—it represents a fundamentally new approach to treating neurological disease and brain cancer. We set out to build a platform that could help address a therapeutic barrier that has limited care for decades.”
Dr. Chad Gordon, Founder and Executive Chair, CraniUS Therapeutics
“Having led large academic health systems and worked at the intersection of care delivery and innovation, we’ve put robots in operating rooms and AI in radiology suites, but the blood-brain barrier has stubbornly ignored a century of pharmaceutical and medical device innovation.”
“NeuroPASS represents exactly the kind of ‘why not?’ thinking that transforms medicine, not incremental improvement, but a fundamental reimagining of how we access the brain.”
Dr. Stephen Klasko, Board Member, CraniUS Therapeutics
