F ormer Navy SEAL-turned entrepreneur Jeff Sabados has raised nearly $1 million in funding to embark on his next venture: Cambridge, Mass.-based Resilience Therapeutics, a drug discovery company with the aim of developing a cure for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Last week, Sabados closed a $975,000 funding round out of a planned $3 million fundraise with investors including New York-based PsychoGenics, a pre-clinical central nervous system research lab; and an individual angel investment from Jason Fuller, principal at the venture firm New Enterprise Associates.
"We're really going after the cure, not just symptom relief," said Sabados, who spent almost a decade in the U.S. Navy before becoming an entrepreneur.
Sabados was most recently CEO and co-founder of MIT-born N12 Technologies, a Cambridge-based company developing a way to make composite, lightweight materials commonly used in the aerospace, transportation and automotive industries stronger, cheaper and lighter. As of last summer, that company had raised $5.27 million in funding.
With Resilience Therapeutics, Sabados and his team hope to identify new drugs that could provide a neurological cure for PTSD by targeting its biological foundations.
In addition to partnering with PsychoGenics, the company is also partnering with universities and research institutions to exclusively license intellectual property; those include: Emory University, The Scripps Research Institute, Tulane University and the University of Vermont.
"We hope over the next 12 to 15 months we'll be doing a significant amount of research that's never been done before at the pre-clinical level," he said
Millions of Americans are diagnosed with PTSD annually, with military veterans being some of the most high-profile sufferers. According to statistics published in 2012, up to 20 percent of the 2.6 million military members deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have PTSD.
Resilience Therapeutics was developed with the aim of curing PTSD in all those who are afflicted with the disorder, from veterans to policemen and women, firefighters, victims of domestic abuse and terror attacks.
"There's an obvious, huge unmet clinical need," said Fuller, previously an investor at Boston-based Third Rock Ventures. "Everyone has traumatic experiences at some point and many will develop a stress-related disorder ... but Resilience Therapeutics is joining the academic thought leaders in trying to understand the biology and use that to eventually develop really great drugs."
Resilience Therapeutics hopes to close its entire $3 million funding round by the end of March. The company has three other co-founders and is currently working out of a lab in Cambridge.
Posted By: Brian Lenskold
Wednesday, January 21st 2015 at 9:30AM
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