neuroscience
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AbbVie planned for life after Humira.
Its biggest medicine was heading for a sales cliff. AbbVie spent years building the businesses that would have to catch it - and learned how expensive a wrong bet can be.
BrainCheck and the 15 minutes that need a follow-up
A cognitive test can start a difficult conversation. BrainCheck is building a business around what happens next: the records, the care plan, and the people who must carry it out.
Gilgamesh Pharma sold a psychedelic. The next bet is a pill.
An AbbVie deal worth up to $1.2 billion bought one Gilgamesh program. The independent company that emerged is pursuing a harder prize: fast depression treatment that fits ordinary life.
Click Therapeutics wants your phone on the prescription
The New York company turns cognitive exercises and behavioral interventions into prescription treatments. Its harder experiment is getting clinically tested software into everyday care.
Prilenia’s next trial is the real test
An oral drug, two devastating diseases, and a question that money cannot settle. After missed trial endpoints and a withdrawn European application, Prilenia is putting pridopidine through another round of clinical tests.
The Brain Map That Outlived the Company
AGY Therapeutics raised millions to turn maps of diseased brains into medicines. Its most revealing experiment came when it licensed a drug it had not invented.
The Medicine That Does Not Ask You to Wake Up
XWPharma built an investigational sleep drug around a plain inconvenience: treatment should not interrupt the night it is meant to repair. A $20 million upfront license turned that idea into a business deal.
Neurelis Put an Old Seizure Drug in the Nose - and Built a $300 Million Business Around the Hard Part
The medicine was familiar. The delivery problem was not. Neurelis spent more than a decade making diazepam work as a practical nasal rescue treatment - then showed how a narrow patient problem can become a platform, a pipeline and a profitable commercial company.
Neurogazer Turns a 40-Minute Brain Scan Into a Report Card for Who You Might Become
A Johns Hopkins neuroscientist and his CEO brother built a company that reads 169 things out of a single MRI - cognition, temperament, aptitude, risk. From Baltimore, they are betting families will pay to see it.
The Psychedelic Fund That Grew Into a Bet on the Whole Brain
PsyMed Ventures started with a podcast and a narrow question about psychedelic medicine. Six years later, its portfolio makes a broader wager: that the next important health companies will treat the brain as biology, data and lived experience at once.
Novartis Cut Away an Empire to Bet on Five Ways of Making Medicine
The Swiss giant spent years shedding businesses until only innovative medicines remained. Now its growth depends on turning five scientific platforms into treatments that health systems will pay for - and patients can actually reach.
The 245-Year-Old Drugmaker Betting Its Next Act on Six Big Swings
Takeda began as a medicine shop in Osaka in 1781. Now a new CEO must turn a sprawling global portfolio, a $30 billion-plus revenue base and six late-stage programs into the company’s next generation of growth.
Neurocrine Biosciences
One movement-disorder medicine turned a San Diego research shop into a multibillion-dollar biopharma. Now Neurocrine is spending that advantage on rare endocrine disease, psychiatry and the difficult biology between brain and body.
Alkermes
Alkermes spent decades teaching medicines to last longer. Now the neuroscience company is trying something harder: building a business around the brain's switches for addiction, psychosis and wakefulness.
Transhuman Inc.
Transhuman Inc. is a mental health and emotionAI research and development company founded in 2014 by Amanda Johnstone and Dr. Roy Sugarman. Best known for its free peer-support check-in app Be A Looper, which operated in 87 countries, the company builds proprietary EmotionAI technologies at the intersection of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Bodies (IoB), and human emotion. Its focus is on suicide prevention, emotional communication, and human-to-computer relationships.
Axonis Therapeutics
Axonis Therapeutics is a Boston-based, neuro-focused biotechnology company developing first- and best-in-class oral small-molecule medicines that target KCC2, a chloride transporter that acts as the brain's master regulator of inhibitory neurotransmission. Spun out of research from Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School and Universite Laval, Axonis is advancing its lead candidate AXN-027 - a first-in-class KCC2 potentiator - toward clinical proof of concept in epilepsy, chronic pain and other CNS disorders, backed by an oversubscribed $115 million Series A closed in 2024.
Coro Health
Coro Health is an Austin-based healthcare technology company that delivers clinically proven therapeutic music and multi-faith spiritual programming through a fully licensed streaming service built specifically for care settings. Its flagship MusicFirst platform uses a patented Music Prescription Builder - designed by music therapists, neuroscientists, and music designers - to generate individualized programs shown in peer-reviewed trials to reduce depression and agitation in dementia and long-term care residents. The company also offers FaithFirst multi-faith content and EnrichFirst entertainment, reaching more than a million annual users across thousands of senior living communities and hospitals in the U.S. and Canada.
Neurable
Neurable is a Boston-based neurotechnology company building non-invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that fit inside everyday consumer hardware. Its AI cleans and interprets EEG brain signals captured by soft sensors embedded in products like the MW75 Neuro headphones, translating brain activity into real-time measures of focus, mental fatigue and cognitive recovery. Spun out of University of Michigan research, Neurable aims to make understanding your own brain as natural as checking your step count - starting with headphones and expanding into gaming and enterprise wearables.
NeuShen Therapeutics
NeuShen Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biotech developing novel small-molecule and gene-therapy treatments for central nervous system disorders such as schizophrenia, depression and epilepsy. Founded in 2021 by Joan Huaqiong Shen, MD, PhD, and headquartered in Shanghai with an R&D center in the Boston area, the company runs a pipeline led by NS-136, a selective M4 receptor positive allosteric modulator for schizophrenia, and NS-041, a highly selective KCNQ2/3 activator for epilepsy and depression.
Presidio Medical, Inc.
Presidio Medical is a clinical-stage medical device company in San Mateo, California, developing a proprietary Ultra Low Frequency (ULF) neuromodulation platform. By delivering very low frequency biphasic electrical currents through leads implanted in the epidural space, Presidio's spinal cord stimulation system reversibly blocks the conduction of pain signals along nerves without damaging tissue. Its first target is chronic nociceptive low back pain, a large and underserved indication with no approved SCS therapy. Backed by Deerfield Management and others, the company raised a $72M Series C in 2023 and received FDA IDE approval in 2025 to run its global pivotal FULFILL trial.
ProJenX
ProJenX is a New York City clinical-stage biotechnology company developing prosetin, a first-in-class, oral, brain-penetrant MAP4K inhibitor for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and other neurodegenerative brain diseases. Spun out of a two-decade collaboration between the nonprofit Project ALS and Columbia University researchers, ProJenX is built on the discovery that inhibiting MAP4 kinases protects motor neurons across multiple patient-derived stem cell models of ALS. The company is running the PRO-101 Phase 1b trial in people living with ALS.
Stellaromics Inc.
Stellaromics is a Boston-based spatial biology company building tools that map gene expression in three dimensions inside intact tissue. Spun out of the labs of Karl Deisseroth (Stanford) and Xiao Wang (MIT/Broad Institute), the company commercializes its Pyxa platform, which uses proprietary STARmap and RIBOmap chemistry to deliver multiplexed 3D spatial transcriptomics and translatomics in tissue sections up to 100 microns thick at subcellular resolution. It targets researchers in neuroscience, oncology and immunology who need to preserve native tissue architecture rather than rely on flat 2D thin-section methods.
Vertero Therapeutics, Inc.
Vertero Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biotechnology company in Woburn, Massachusetts, developing oral small-molecule drugs for neurodegenerative diseases by targeting causative drivers in the body's periphery - primarily the gut - rather than only the brain. Formerly Axial Therapeutics, the company rebranded as Vertero in October 2025. Its lead candidate, VT-5006, is a gut-selective small molecule for Parkinson's disease that targets CsgA, a bacterial protein linked to protein aggregation and neuroinflammation, and is entering Phase 1 trials.
Muse by Interaxon Inc.
Muse, made by Toronto-based Interaxon Inc., is a brain-sensing headband that turns clinical-grade EEG into a consumer wearable. First shipped in 2014, Muse reads your brainwaves and, through a companion app, gives real-time audio feedback to guide meditation, track sleep, and train focus. The company has since layered on fNIRS and SpO2 sensing (Muse S Athena, 2025) and an AI brain-health platform trained on more than a billion minutes of EEG data, positioning Muse at the intersection of consumer wellness and clinical neuroscience.
Therini Bio, Inc.
Therini Bio is a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing fibrin-targeting immunotherapies for neurodegenerative and retinal diseases driven by vascular dysfunction. Founded in 2019 on the neurovascular research of Dr. Katerina Akassoglou at UCSF and the Gladstone Institutes, the company's lead antibody THN391 selectively blocks fibrin's inflammatory epitope to halt chronic neuroinflammation without interfering with normal blood clotting. Backed by roughly $145M in total funding from investors including Eli Lilly, Sanofi Ventures, Merck's MRL Ventures and the Dementia Discovery Fund, Therini is advancing THN391 into Phase 1b trials for Alzheimer's disease and diabetic macular edema.
Arcade Therapeutics
Arcade Therapeutics is a New York-based digital therapeutics company that builds clinically validated mobile games to treat mental illness. Founded by healthcare entrepreneur Raj Amin and neuroscientist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, the company embeds a research-backed technique called attention bias modification into engaging games, starting with StarStarter for anxiety. Its lead prescription product, ABM-01, is pursuing FDA submission as one of the first game-based treatments for social anxiety disorder, with a pipeline extending to depression, addiction, and other conditions.
Attune Neurosciences, Inc.
Attune Neurosciences is a San Francisco-based, clinical-stage medical device company building what it calls the first wearable, non-invasive focused-ultrasound system for deep brain therapy. Its investigational headband, ATTN201, uses low-intensity transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) to reach precise deep-brain targets - like the central medial thalamus - while recording EEG and head movement, aiming to treat sleep and wake disorders, depression, addiction recovery, and other neurological and psychiatric conditions without drugs or surgery.
Impairment Science, Inc.
Impairment Science, Inc. is a Cambridge, Massachusetts neuroscience company behind DRUID, a smartphone app that measures cognitive and motor impairment from any cause - cannabis, alcohol, fatigue, medication, or illness - in about one to three minutes. Conceived in 2016 by longtime UMass Boston psychology professor Dr. Michael Milburn and incorporated in 2018, DRUID scores a person's reaction time, decision-making, hand-eye coordination, and balance against their own sober baseline. It is the only impairment technology with three published, peer-reviewed studies validating its accuracy, including research led by Johns Hopkins School of Medicine faculty. The company now sells DRUID Enterprise, a cloud portal that lets employers in construction, mining, EMS, and other safety-critical industries run fitness-for-duty checks without a breathalyzer or urine sample.
NeuroAge Therapeutics
NeuroAge Therapeutics is a San Francisco tech-bio company that measures how old your brain actually is - and tries to make it younger. Founded in 2022 by physician-scientist Dr. Christin Glorioso, the company's flagship NeuroAge Test blends brain MRI, cognitive games, proprietary RNA blood biomarkers, and genetic screening into a single 'brain age' score that aims to flag dementia risk up to 30 years before symptoms appear. The longer-term goal is bolder: small-molecule drugs that reprogram aging neurons back toward a younger state.
Roga
Roga is a neurotech company building a non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation wearable paired with an AI-guided meditation app to reduce stress and burnout. Founded by two people who each managed clinical anxiety, the discreet behind-the-ear device sends gentle electrical pulses to calm the nervous system, while the companion app personalizes meditation and tracks progress. Based in Los Angeles and Toronto, Roga sells direct to consumers and to employers running workplace wellness programs.