PROVIDENCE – MindImmune Therapeutics Inc., a South Kingstown-based pharmaceutical company with ties to the University of Rhode Island, has closed on $12.4 million in Series A financing that includes Dolby Family Ventures, Pfizer Ventures, the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation, Trend Venture, RightHill Ventures and several private investors.
Proceeds of the financing will help MindImmune in advance its lead program in preclinical development, targeting Alzheimer’s disease as the primary indication, the company said in an announcement this week.
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“We are honored to have the support of both existing and new investors, several of which are recognized for their deep sector competence in the field of neurodegenerative diseases,” said Stevin Zorn, CEO and president of MindImmune. “With the resources provided, we are excited to accelerate our preclinical research an development activities, aiming to advance our lead program to investigational new drug candidate stage.”
As part of the financing, the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation is supporting research on a new way to measure immune cell recruitment in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. This study is designed to quantify the amount of peripheral immune cells recruited into the central nervous damage in Alzheimer’s disease, as well as potentially serve as a diagnostic and/or biomarker of neuroinflammation in patients afflicted with Alzheimer’s.
“MindImmune has distinguished itself in pioneering a potentially fundamental new approach to modulate the innate immune response in Alzheimer’s disease,” said Tracy Saxton, managing director at Dolby Family Ventures. ”We are pleased to back this outstanding group of scientific founders to advance our understanding of the role of the innate immune system in the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, and to nominate a clinical candidate directly aiming to block the damage caused by these peripheral immune cells.”
MindImmune was launched in 2016 by Zorn, Frank Menniti, and Robert Nelson.
The company is affiliated with the George and Anne Ryan Institute for Neuroscience at URI, where the co-founders have faculty appointments as Ryan research professors of neuroscience. MindImmune is based at URI’s Kingston campus.
The company claims it has made a fundamental discovery that may relate to the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. It has discovered that cells of the peripheral immune system enter and cause damage to neurons afflicted with Alzheimer’s pathology. MindImmune aims to develop a novel therapeutic antibody to act in the peripheral system to block immune cells from causing neural damage, thereby reducing cognitive symptoms and slowing progression of this devastating disease.
The company is pursuing further research on the premise that this neuroinflammatory process may be the cause of central nervous system damage in a broader range of neurodegenerative conditions.
