US neurobehavioral health company BlackThorn raises $76m to advance AI-driven targeted therapeutics

California-based neurobehavioral health company BlackThorn Therapeutics has raised $76 million through a Series B financing round to advance targeted therapeutics using the next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

The new investors in BlackThorn Therapeutics are Polaris Partners, Premier Partners, Vertex Ventures HC, and Scripps Research. Existing investors Alexandria Venture Investments, Johnson & Johnson Innovation, Altitude Life Science Ventures, ARCH Venture Partners, Biomatics Capital, GV (previously Google Ventures), and Mercury Fund also took part in the funding of the neurobehavioral health company.

Paul Berns –  Venture Partner at ARCH Venture Partners, commenting on the neurobehavioral health company, said:  “Making personalized medicine for mental health a reality requires the ability to gather, integrate and analyze a wide variety of data at scale.

“BlackThorn has positioned itself at the forefront of these efforts by building the largest library of deeply phenotyped clinical neurobiological data and a cloud-based platform powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to inform rational, targeted drug discovery and development.”

US neurobehavioral health company BlackThorn secures $76m funding to advance AI-powered targeted therapeutics. Image courtesy of Pete Linforth from Pixabay.

The neurobehavioral health company has developed a cloud-based computational psychiatry and data platform called PathFinder that collects, integrates and analyses multimodal data at great speed and scale.

BlackThorn applies its data-driven methods to generate an understanding of the core underlying pathophysiology of neurobehavioral disorders and applies the insights to produce objective neuromarkers, which help in drug target identification, stratification of patients and objective clinical trial endpoints.

Through the identification of more homogenous patient subgroups who share underlying neurobiology, the neurobehavioral health company strives to direct its drug candidates to neurobiologically-defined patient populations who are most probable to respond.

Commenting on the neurobehavioral health company, Bill Martin – BlackThorn president and chief operating officer said: “BlackThorn was founded to bring new therapies to patients by applying advances in computational sciences to address patient heterogeneity, one of the biggest historical challenges in the field of neuropsychiatric drug development.

“Three years later, insights from our data-driven approaches are yielding patient enrichment strategies that could increase the probability of clinical trial success and improve patient outcomes. We are grateful for our investors’ support to continue advancing our platform and therapeutic pipeline as we build out a world-class team at the intersection of technology and clinical neuroscience.”