SciNeuro announced Thursday that it raised $53 million to study a former GSK compound in an eye complication of diabetes as well as dementia.
The neuroscience biotech’s second venture funding round comes five years after its initial
$100 million
raise that was announced in 2020. The latest raise, which the biotech did not explicitly call a Series B, was led by Lilly Asia Ventures and ARCH Venture Partners, with the two firms returning to fund SciNeuro.
SciNeuro CEO Min Li, the former global head of neuroscience R&D at GSK, was previously a venture partner at Lilly Asia Ventures. He built the biotech as a transpacific outfit that can benefit from both the US and China biotech ecosystems. The company has offices in Rockville, MD, and in Shanghai.
Li described to
Endpoints News
in an interview that SciNeuro has its “center of gravity in the US, while benefiting from the speed and resources in China.” For one molecule, the company did its manufacturing in China, while for another, SciNeuro leveraged the country’s CRO infrastructure, Li said.
SciNeuro also announced Thursday that Hogan Wan, who was previously head of investor relations and strategy at Ascentage Pharma, has been named CFO.
The new funds will extend SciNeuro’s runway beyond 2027, Li said. Its main asset, codenamed SNP318, is what’s known as an Lp-PLA2 inhibitor. SciNeuro
licensed
a set of compounds from that class from GSK in 2022, seeking to study them in neurological diseases. GSK had studied an Lp-PLA2 blocker called darapladib in heart disease, but the drug failed back-to-back pivotal trials.
SciNeuro’s SNP318 is a version of that compound that better penetrates the brain. It has started a Phase 2 study in the US in diabetic macular edema, with a trial in dementia “also just about to start,” Li said.
Li said that SciNeuro expects to have data on that asset at the end of 2026 or early 2027.
SciNeuro also has a handful of other programs in its pipeline, including early-stage Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s drugs. Li said he expects the funding to also help the company get early human data on either its LRRK2-targeted drug for Parkinson’s or its beta amyloid-targeting drug for Alzheimer’s. The company last month announced a $5 million grant from the Michael J. Fox Foundation for preclinical development of its LRRK2 program.