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For almost 8 years, Bruce Bean and Clifford Woolf of Harvard and Boston Children have been working in the lab to show how you can inhibit pain and itch signaling in a targeted set of neurons. And now, a VC union has assembled a team that has taken her to the clinic to see how he can behave in humans, giving them a $ 27 million spin-off.
"We do some virtual work," says Richard Batycky, CEO of Nocion Therapeutics. At present, this means 5 people in the full-time team, with the intention of becoming a lean day 15.
Scientist with extensive experience in R & D in the respiratory field, Batycky was one of Alkermes spin-off Civitas leaders, which was purchased by Acorda for $ 525 million. Last August, he left Acorda to join the Nocion team, which was exploring how sensory neurons react to "harmful stimuli". And he is perfectly aware of the respiratory implications of their work.
The key to the scientific work has been the ability of founders to develop sodium channel blockers – nocions – that could be positively charged to slide into large open pores through pain and inflammation in target neurons.
"We can use large open pore channels through painful stimuli or inflammatory mediators like Trojan horses to deliver drug molecules into cells and stop their electrical activity," says Bean. "The large pore channels cause the cells to trigger, but they can also be used to smother it."
Coughing, itching, pain and inflammation are all on the radar. And the way also leads to asthma, inflammatory bowel disease and more.
Series A was led by Canaan and F-Prime, with additional liquidity from the Partners Innovation Fund and BioInnovation Capital.
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