Healthcare

A healthcare startup that wants to offer personalized treatments for depression just used this presentation to raise $14 million

People with depression often go through trial and error to find treatments that work best for them.
The German biotech company HMNC believes there’s a better way to approach depression.
It just raised $14 million from investors to follow through on its strategy.

When a patient is sick, doctors can run tests to help determine what’s making them ill — and how to make them better.

The German biotech company HMNC Brain Health is looking to do something similar in psychiatry. It’s developing drugs geared toward patients who take tests — namely, blood draws that will undergo a genomic analysis, or an examination of the patient’s genetic makeup — to determine whether they would be a good fit for a specific kind of treatment.

Companies focused on treating mental illnesses are beginning to look at how biomarkers, or measurements like brain waves or proteins in blood samples, could help them develop drugs geared toward subtypes of an illness like depression. This could help clinicians match patients to their optimal treatments.

HMNC announced Thursday that it had raised 14.3 million euros, or about $14 million, from investors like Josef Ackermann, a former CEO of Deutsche Bank; Wilhelm Beier, the founder of the German pharmaceutical company Dermapharm; and the German soccer player Toni Kroos. The company has raised a total of 42.3 million euros.

“We believe that what is standard in oncology has to become the standard in psychiatry,” Max Döbler, HMNC’s chief business officer, told Insider.

Döbler said that medication for mental illnesses should become more precisely targeted to patients’ diseases, in the same way that cancer treatments have in recent years.

See the presentation HMNC Brain Health used to raise $14 million:

HMNC was founded in 2010 with the goal of developing better, more precise treatments for mental illnesses.

The biotech firm was founded by Dr. Florian Holsboer, a leading depression researcher, and the German entrepreneur Carsten Maschmeyer, who’s a billionaire.

The company is looking for ways to create medicines that target specific kinds of depression — because depression isn’t a monolith.

“We want to find the right medication for the right patients,” Döbler said. “Due to the lack of innovation in psychiatry, a huge number of patients do not get the right treatment.”

HMNC’s chief medical officer, Dr. Hans Eriksson, told Insider that while there were several antidepressants on the market, physicians often had little guidance as to which treatment would work best for which patient — figuring it out often requires trial and error.

HMNC is focused on making this process more straightforward by using blood tests to determine which patients with depression are more likely to respond to which treatments. The company said its goal was to give patients personalized treatments within one week of the initial test.

The company is aiming to develop a platform that can be used to track patient outcomes every time a patient is tested and treated to provide data to clinicians, Eriksson said.

HMNC has three drugs in its pipeline, and all are focused on difficult-to-treat depression. The lead program, Nelivabon, is hoping to receive market approval by 2028.

The company is focused on developing drugs that are expected to be highly effective in targeted groups of patients. HMNC is homing in on patients who have a disturbance in their stress-management system, something the company said it could test for by identifying biomarkers in their blood.

HMNC’s lead program is testing a drug that was developed, and abandoned, by the pharmaceutical company Sanofi. HMNC said that in an upcoming midstage trial with 324 participants, it would evaluate both the drug and its testing method to look at the effectiveness of its “precision psychiatry approach.”

The company’s team hails from companies like Roche, AstraZeneca, and KPMG, as well as Stanford University.

Decomplex

A healthcare startup that wants to offer personalized treatments for depression just used this presentation to raise $14 million

A healthcare startup that wants to offer personalized treatments for depression just used this presentation to raise $14 million

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See the presentation HMNC Brain Health used to raise $14 million:

HMNC was founded in 2010 with the goal of developing better, more precise treatments for mental illnesses.

The biotech firm was founded by Dr. Florian Holsboer, a leading depression researcher, and the German entrepreneur Carsten Maschmeyer, who’s a billionaire.

The company is looking for ways to create medicines that target specific kinds of depression — because depression isn’t a monolith.

“We want to find the right medication for the right patients,” Döbler said. “Due to the lack of innovation in psychiatry, a huge number of patients do not get the right treatment.”

HMNC’s chief medical officer, Dr. Hans Eriksson, told Insider that while there were several antidepressants on the market, physicians often had little guidance as to which treatment would work best for which patient — figuring it out often requires trial and error.

HMNC is focused on making this process more straightforward by using blood tests to determine which patients with depression are more likely to respond to which treatments. The company said its goal was to give patients personalized treatments within one week of the initial test.

The company is aiming to develop a platform that can be used to track patient outcomes every time a patient is tested and treated to provide data to clinicians, Eriksson said.

HMNC has three drugs in its pipeline, and all are focused on difficult-to-treat depression. The lead program, Nelivabon, is hoping to receive market approval by 2028.

The company is focused on developing drugs that are expected to be highly effective in targeted groups of patients. HMNC is homing in on patients who have a disturbance in their stress-management system, something the company said it could test for by identifying biomarkers in their blood.

The company’s team hails from companies like Roche, AstraZeneca, and KPMG, as well as Stanford University.

Döbler said the latest round of funding would be used to progress the company’s pipeline, as well as expand the HMNC team.