PureTech Launches Seaport Therapeutics with $100 Million

Clinical-stage biotherapeutics company PureTech Health has launched Seaport Therapeutics with $100 million in an oversubscribed Series A financing. Seaport will focus on development of a pipeline of neuropsychiatric medicines created and initially developed at PureTech. Following the Series A financing, PureTech will hold equity ownership in Seaport of 61.5 percent on a diluted basis.

Seaport will be led by Daphne Zohar, Chief Executive Officer, and Steven M. Paul, M.D., Chair of the Board of Directors. Zohar is the founder and former CEO of PureTech where she also co-founded Karuna Therapeutics, another CNS-focused biotech founded by PureTech that was recently acquired by Bristol Myers Squibb for $14 billion. Paul is the former CEO and Chair of the Board of Directors of Karuna and also former President of R&D at Eli Lilly, where he oversaw the development of CNS drugs.

All of the programs in Seaport’s pipeline are based on the Glyph platform, Seaport’s proprietary technology platform which uses the lymphatic system to enable and enhance the oral administration of drugs. With the Glyph platform, drugs are absorbed like dietary fats through the intestinal lymphatic system and transported into circulation. Seaport believes the Glyph technology has the potential to be widely applied to many therapeutic molecules that have high first-pass metabolism leading to low bioavailability and/or side effects, including hepatotoxicity.

Seaport’s most advanced therapeutic candidate is SPT-300, in development for the treatment of anxious depression. Allopregnanolone has demonstrated therapeutic benefit in a range of neuropsychiatric conditions, but it is only approved as an intravenous infusion, which has limited the scope of its clinical use. Using the Glyph platform, SPT-300 retains the activity and potency of endogenous allopregnanolone in an oral form and has the potential to capture the breadth of the natural biological response. In a Phase 2a clinical trial, SPT-300 demonstrated proof-of-concept in a validated clinical model of anxiety in healthy volunteers. (Source: PureTech Health Website, 09 April, 2024)