Jeff Jonas spent a decade building Sage Therapeutics before stepping down in 2023. By the time he departed, the company had grown from a fledgling startup to a publicly traded firm with a marketed medicine — and left Jonas yearning for the days of running a small biotech.
Now, as a partner with Cure Ventures, Jonas is getting that chance. On Tuesday, a new firm Cure is backing, Tortugas Neuroscience, emerged from stealth with $106 million in its coffers and Jonas as its CEO. The startup’s funding includes a seed round led by Cure and a Series A involving the firm and two other investors, Column Group and AN Venture Partners.
The Framingham, Massachusetts-based biotech is starting out with a quartet of experimental medicines already in clinical testing for a variety of central nervous system disorders such as schizophrenia, tinnitus and focal epilepsy. All were licensed from Japanese drugmaker Eisai and Shanghai-based Jiangsu Hansoh Pharmaceutical Group and are small molecules with “derisked mechanisms of action,” the company said in a statement.
Venture firms have increasingly looked to China of late to build new companies around drug prospects they can speedily move forward. Many of these firms have been focused on medicines for cancer, immune diseases or metabolic conditions; Tortugas stands out for its focus on neurological disorders.
“The process of building a biotech today requires a different blueprint than it did fifteen years ago,” Jonas told BioPharma Dive in an email, noting that the drugs licensed from Eisai and Hansoh give Tortugas a “stable clinical foundation” and the chance to quickly build value. Those medicines also offer “a rare combination of validated mechanisms and a long patent life,” he added.
The financing proceeds will help Tortugas complete Phase 2 studies for two of those programs. It plans to develop drugs in-house at a later date, according to Jonas.
Jonas is joined at Tortugas by Al Robichaud, Sage’s former chief scientific officer and now also a partner at Cure. At Sage, the duo helped take the company public and bring to market the first of eventually two drugs for postpartum depression. But Sage also suffered numerous clinical setbacks, had trouble selling its medicines and was sold last year to Supernus Pharmaceuticals for a sliver of what it was worth at its peak.
