San Francisco start-up Verge Genomics, a Y Combinator graduate, has raised $32m in a series A funding led by DFJ. Verge is developing drugs to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, by comparing samples of cells from people who have died from the disease with those of healthy brains and also uses mice to study human diseases. The company says it will use its new funds for research into treatments that could help patients suffering from ALS or other neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. “A cell will never be a brain,” says Michael Sasner of the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, ME, whose expertise is mice genetically engineered to mimic human neurological diseases. The company is focusing on finding chemical molecules that can be turned into drugs, and aims to expand its research to include Parkinson’s disease.
San Francisco start-up Verge Genomics, a Y Combinator graduate, has raised $32m in a series A funding led by DFJ. Verge is developing drugs to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, by comparing samples of cells from people who have died from the disease with those of healthy brains and also uses mice to study human diseases. The company says it will use its new funds for research into treatments that could help patients suffering from ALS or other neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. The company is focusing on finding chemical molecules that can be turned into drugs, and aims to expand its research to include Parkinson’s disease.