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.
Joan Huaqiong Shen is the founder and CEO of NeuShen Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech with R&D centers in Shanghai and Boston that develops treatments for psychiatric and neurological disorders. A physician-scientist trained in psychiatry and neurology, she spent decades leading central-nervous-system drug programs at Eli Lilly, Wyeth, Pfizer, Hengrui and Johnson & Johnson before running R&D and serving as CEO at I-Mab Biopharma, where she took the company public on Nasdaq and struck a global partnership with AbbVie. In 2026 NeuShen closed a Series A+ round led by Lilly Asia Ventures as its lead compound NS-136 advanced into Phase 2 trials.
Amae Health is a Los Angeles-based, psychiatry-led healthcare company building in-person outpatient clinics for people living with severe mental illness such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and treatment-resistant depression. Founded in 2022 by Stas Sokolin and Sonia Garcia, it pairs a wraparound clinical team - psychiatrists, therapists, primary care providers, dietitians, health coaches, peer mentors and social workers - with a data platform built on Palantir Foundry. The company reports a 30-day hospital readmission rate under 4% versus a 23% national average, and raised a $25M Series B in November 2025, bringing total funding to more than $50M.
Sam Clark, MD, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Terran Biosciences, a CNS-focused platform biotech he started in 2017 from his medical school dorm room with $10,000. A neuroscientist trained at MIT and Columbia, Clark has built one of the largest psychedelic development programs in the industry, is the named inventor on more than 200 patent applications, and holds the world's first patents for new forms of psilocybin and MDMA. Terran pairs a medicinal-chemistry drug design engine with an FDA-cleared neuroimaging software platform and a pipeline of late-stage assets licensed from Sanofi and Pierre Fabre.

Tom Large is the CEO and co-founder of Blue Oak Pharmaceuticals, a Waltham, Massachusetts startup hunting for the next generation of medicines for brain disorders. A neurobiologist by training, he spent two decades inside big pharma - leading neuroscience research at Eli Lilly and running preclinical research and translational medicine at Sunovion - before launching Blue Oak in 2016 to chase drugs with genuinely new mechanisms for bipolar depression, schizophrenia and treatment-resistant depression. His teams pioneered a target-agnostic approach to CNS drug discovery, and he later partnered with AI specialist Exscientia to design 'bispecific' small molecules that hit two targets at once.
Blue Oak Pharmaceuticals is a Waltham, Massachusetts biotech founded in 2016 to discover the next generation of drugs for brain disorders. Led by neurobiologist and former Eli Lilly and Sunovion executive Tom Large, the company designs novel, CNS-focused 'privileged chemotypes' and pairs them with systems-neurobiology behavioral assays and AI to hunt first-in-class small molecules for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and treatment-resistant depression. Its work runs through partnerships with phenotypic-screening firm PsychoGenics and AI drug-design company Exscientia.
Terran Biosciences is a platform biotech developing therapeutics and technologies for neurological and psychiatric disease. It runs one of the industry's largest psychedelic development programs - psilocybin, LSD, MDMA derivatives and novel prodrugs - alongside late-stage schizophrenia assets licensed from Sanofi and Pierre Fabre, GMP psychedelic manufacturing, and NM-101, an FDA-cleared cloud platform for neuromelanin MRI analysis.
Leal Therapeutics is a Worcester, Massachusetts biotech founded in 2021 by repeat CNS entrepreneur Asa Abeliovich, the scientist behind Prevail Therapeutics (acquired by Eli Lilly). Leal builds first-in-class neuro-metabolic medicines on a single idea: many brain diseases share a broken metabolism, and correcting those imbalances can treat conditions from schizophrenia to ALS. Backed by roughly $114M in total funding, its pipeline includes LTX-001, a brain-penetrant oral glutaminase inhibitor in the clinic, and LTX-002, an antisense oligonucleotide for ALS.

Asa Abeliovich is a physician-scientist turned serial biotech founder who spent two decades at the lab bench at Columbia before deciding the only way to get his ideas into patients was to start companies. He co-founded Alector, founded and sold Prevail Therapeutics to Eli Lilly for about $1 billion, and now runs Leal Therapeutics, a Worcester startup chasing a contrarian idea: that fixing the brain's broken metabolism can treat everything from schizophrenia to ALS to Alzheimer's. Leal spent over two years in stealth before surfacing with a clinical-stage pipeline and roughly $114 million raised.