One of the world’s largest private equity firms and one of its largest drugmakers have created a new company that will focus on developing drugs to treat central nervous system diseases, following the latter company’s decision to no longer invest in developing drugs in those diseases.
Bain Capital and Pfizer said Tuesday that they had created Cerevel Therapeutics, a privately held company that will develop drugs to treat Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, schizophrenia and addiction. Bain’s private equity and life sciences funds have committed $350 million to the project, with the ability to provide additional capital as well.
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The current pipeline, consisting of drugs created by Pfizer, includes three clinical-stage candidates – a D1 partial agonist for Parkinson’s, a GABA 2/3 agonist for epilepsy and a muscarinic M4 positive modulator – and several preclinical ones. Modulation of M4 msucarinic receptors has been investigated as a potential mechanism of action for use in schizophrenia. The preclinical candidates include a dopamine D3 antagonist and a kappa opiate antagonist in candidate-stage development, and an M4 agonist, a PDE4b inhibitor and an LRRK2 inhibitor in lead development.
The creation of Cerevel follows Pfizer’s decision, announced in January, to divest from drug development in neurological disorders, a move that resulted in the company cutting about 300 jobs. Later, in June, the New York-based drugmaker boosted the funding pool of its venture capital arm by $600 million, one-quarter of which was devoted to neuroscience. Two Pfizer executives – Morris Birnbaum, chief scientific officer of internal medicine, and Doug Giordano, senior vice president of worldwide business development – will join the new company’s board of directors. Meanwhile, Pfizer itself will have a 25 percent equity stake in Cerevel.
“We are excited that Cerevel will continue to develop the Pfizer compounds, contributing to the broad scientific understanding of both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and fulfilling responsibility to patients with these devastating diseases and their families,” Birnbaum said in a statement.
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