Neumora's Phase 3 Trial Miss and a Trio of VC Raises
Watertown companies have now raised $245 million in VC funds in 2026
Advertisement
705 Mount Auburn offers both built out and shell lab space options along with a best-in-class onsite amenity package.
Neumora’s Phase 3 Trial of Navicaprant for major depressive disorder show no significant effects prompting a pipeline re-shuffle and layoffs.
Neumora Therapeutics, headquarters at 260 Arsenal Place, announced that results of their Phase 3 KOSTAL-2 and -3 studies of their lead compound navicaprant for the treatment of major depressive disorder did not reach statistical significance in any of the key primary or secondary end points. The news follows a year long struggle for the drug, after the failure of navicaprant’s KOSTAL-1 trial in January 2025. Based on these results, the company is choosing to end development of the drug. The announcement temporarily dropped the company’s stock value by 50%, before recovering later in the week.
With navicaprant’s failure, Neumora announced a pivot to three other drugs in their pipeline: NMRA-511, a V1a receptor antagonist in Phase 2b trials for Alzheimer’s disease agitation, NMRA-898 an M4 positive allosteric modulator in Phase 1 trials for schizophrenia, and NMRA-215, an NLRP3 inhibitor in pre-clinical development for obesity. The company is positioning NMRA-511 as an alternative to Rexulti, without a black box safety warning. The pre-clinical data for NMRA-215 shows that it performed the best out of four in development NLRP3 inhibitors in weight reduction in obese mouse models, although it would be the last of the four to reach clinical trials. Moreover NLRP3 competitor Ventyx was purchased by big pharma giant Eli Lilly in January specifically to invest and expand Ventyx’s NLRP3 programs. All three of Neumora’s programs have readouts in the second half of 2026.
In conjunction with these repositioning efforts, Neumora is laying off 35% of the company or 34 people, according to the headcount in last annual filing. The company expects the move to save them $8 million this year, after taking into account $2 million in one-time restructuring costs.
For more Neumora news: read the BBJ’s coverage of the restructuring here.
23 Elm Street offers 66,634 SF of cutting -edge, fully furnished spec lab space, engineered to support scientific innovations and empower research with best-in-class facilities.
Triveni Bio, Entact Bio, and Portal Bio each announced new funding rounds.
Triveni Bio, which recently moved to 100 Forge at Arsenal Yards, announced a $65 million Series C financing round co-lead by Ascenta Capital and Janus Henderson Investors. The company announced that proceeds from the sale will be used to accelerate the development of TRIV-573, a bispecific antibody inhibiting KLK5/7 and IL-13 for the treatment of atopic dermatitis .This news comes a few weeks after the company dosed its first healthy volunteer in a Phase 1 trial of TRIV-573. Atopic dermatitis has become a therapeutic area of focus in Watertown, with fellow Arsenal companies Kymera Therapeutics and Enanta Pharmaceuticals also developing therapeutics for the disease. With this Series C raise, Triveni has now raised a total of $272 million in funding since their launch in 2023.
Entact Bio, headquartered at 65 Grove Street, raised $9.99 million in funding according to SEC filings. The company has not yet announced what it will do with the funding. Entact is developing Enhancement Targeting Chimeras (ENTACs): small molecules that enhance protein expression by recruiting deubiquitinase enzymes to remove the ubiquitin tags that mark the protein for degradation. This technology is the inverse of the targeted protein degrader technology used by other Watertown companies C4 Therapeutics, Kymera Therapeutics, Treeline Biosciences, and Foghorn Therapeutics to recruit ubiquitinases to mark a protein for destruction. While the company has not formally announced a target or lead molecule, they recently published a journal article demonstrating a proof of concept ENTAC targeting using the immune checkpoint receptor CTLA4 as a model target.
Portal Bio, headquartered at Biolabs at 134 Coolidge Ave, announced that they have secured $9 million in an oversubscribed funding round lead by NFX. The company’s main technology utilizes mechanical disruption of a cell’s membrane (as opposed to the more commonly used electroporation) to deliver cargo, including nucleic acids, proteins, and small molecules into the cell for cellular engineering and drug discovery assays. The funds will be used to scale the commercial production of their platform. The company also announced the expansion of their contract with DARPA to develop a field deployable version of their technology for point of care cell therapy production, with an early use case evaluated at Mass General Brigham to generate CAR-T cells for cancer therapy. Portal is founder Armon Sharei’s second Watertown-based company. He previously founded SQZ Biotechnologies, one of the initial tenants at Arsenal Yards.
Quick Hits
Pre-Clinical and Clinical Trial News
Enanta Pharmaceuticals (Arsenal on the Charles) advanced their RSV therapeutic Zelicapavir into a Phase 2b/3 Trial starting in Q4 of this year, with data expected in 2027.
Kymera Therapeutics (Arsenal on the Charles) announced new data from a phase 1 safety trial of KT-621 in healthy Japanese adults at the Japanese Dermatological Association
Tectonic Therapeutic (Lynx Building) announced the complete enrollment of their Phase 2 trial of TX45 in patients with pulmonary hypertension associated with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction
People
Triveni Bio CEO Vishal Patel was named an EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2026 New England Finalist.
As part of their Series C raise, Evan Raclin, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Ascenta Capital joined Triveni’s Board of Directors.
That’s all for this week!
