Key points from article :
Montara Therapeutics has secured $8 million in seed funding to advance its innovative BrainOnly platform, which aims to enhance drug safety and effectiveness for neurological diseases.
The funding round, led by SV Health Investors’ Dementia Discovery Fund and Two Bear Capital, with additional support from Dolby Family Ventures and KdT Ventures, will help Montara refine its technology designed to limit drug activity to the brain, minimizing peripheral side effects.
Neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and ALS are major health challenges due to the lack of effective treatments and the difficulty in delivering drugs across the blood-brain barrier without causing adverse effects elsewhere in the body.
Montara's BrainOnly platform seeks to address this by using a dual-component system: a brain-targeted drug combined with a peripheral blocker that restricts the drug's action to the brain.
The technology is based on research from the Shokat Lab at the University of California, San Francisco, published in Nature. Montara’s platform, licensed from UCSF, aims to improve the targeting of both existing and new small molecule therapies for neurological conditions.
Montara's CEO highlighted the potential of their platform to overcome current treatment barriers and offer new options for patients with severe neurological diseases.
The seed funding will support the development of a drug targeting neurologicaldiseases with known clinical benefits but significant side effects, as well as other projects aimed at Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
