Company Overview

Company Description

We are a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company founded to confront the global brain disease crisis by taking a fundamentally different approach to the way treatments for brain diseases are developed. We have rapidly scaled our therapeutic pipeline, which currently consists of seven clinical and preclinical neuroscience programs that target novel mechanisms of action for a broad range of underserved neuropsychiatric disorders and neurodegenerative diseases. We expect to continue to progress the development of our pipeline with the planned initiation of multiple clinical trials across our programs over the next 12 to 18 months, which supports numerous anticipated data readouts. Our most advanced product candidate, navacaprant (NMRA-140), is a novel once-daily oral kappa opioid receptor (KOR) antagonist that is being developed for the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD), which we believe has the potential to provide significant advantages relative to the standard of care, if approved. We are initiating a pivotal Phase 3 program for navacaprant monotherapy in patients with moderate to severe MDD and anticipate releasing topline results for the KOASTAL-1 study in the second half of 2024.

Brain diseases collectively represent one of the largest areas of unmet medical need globally, affecting upwards of 1.5 billion patients. Despite the commercial success of historically approved drugs, the markets for many of the most prevalent brain disorders have been dominated by a single class of drugs, such as serotonin-targeting antidepressants for MDD, leaving patients with a high degree of unmet medical need given the lack of diverse treatment options and mechanisms of action. For example, there are currently over 21 million adults in the United States diagnosed with MDD, 85% of whom either do not receive treatment with a pharmacological agent or fail to achieve remission with first-line selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI)/serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRI) and thus progress onto second-line treatment with another SSRI/SNRI. In addition, patients with common neuropsychiatric disorders and neurodegenerative diseases are heterogeneous, presenting diverse symptoms and multiple underlying disease drivers. Despite the inherent heterogeneity of these disorders, patients are generally diagnosed based on broad disease classifications defined by subjective clinical symptoms rather than by specific underlying genetic and biological mechanisms. As a result, clinical development in neuroscience to date has taken a “one-size-fits-all” approach, in contrast to other areas that have employed more of a targeted patient selection approach. From 2011 to 2020, clinical development success rates for new drug candidates that employed patient selection biomarkers were approximately 16% compared to approximately 8% for those without patient selection biomarkers according to the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO); however, clinical success depends on a number of factors and employing a patient selection biomarker approach does not guarantee that our product candidates will be approved and commercialized. We believe the relative lack of progress and innovation within the broader central nervous system (CNS) therapeutic landscape is due in large part to an insufficient degree of focus on novel, potentially more therapeutically relevant targets implicated in CNS diseases and clinical development strategies that often yield inconclusive results due to the inherent heterogeneity known to occur in patient populations classified by broad symptomatic domains.

We founded Neumora to confront these challenges by taking a fundamentally different approach to the way treatments for brain diseases are developed. We are redefining neuroscience drug development by:

• Building a diversified neuroscience company at scale with a broad therapeutic pipeline and significant capital resources: We have raised over $600 million in funding and purpose-built an industry-leading team of company builders and neuroscience drug developers. As a result, we have quickly scaled a broad therapeutic pipeline consisting of seven clinical and preclinical programs, which we aim to develop to meet unmet medical need across brain health disorders.

• Focusing on therapeutic candidates with novel mechanisms of action: We have built a pipeline of seven clinical and preclinical programs that target novel mechanisms of action with the potential to provide new treatment options to patients that alleviate unmet medical need. Several of our programs target novel mechanisms of actions that have shown preclinical and clinical data from Neumora and other leading biopharmaceutical companies pursuing programs against the same target. For example, another KOR antagonist aticaprant (Janssen Pharmaceuticals) has demonstrated an improvement in depression and anhedonia in prior clinical trials and M4 muscarinic receptor-targeting compounds have demonstrated potential as an approach to treating schizophrenia in multiple, placebo-controlled clinical trials.

• Leveraging a precision neuroscience approach with the goal of maximizing the value of our programs: To better understand the biological drivers of heterogeneous brain diseases and to identify targeted patient populations of interest, we have built our Precision Toolbox, which integrates a suite of translational and clinical tools with proprietary machine learning algorithms and methods, and incorporates insights from analyzing patient data. We believe our Precision Toolbox will enable us to execute potential strategies to gain confidence in a target or potential indication, help identify biomarkers, enroll the right patients in our clinical studies, optimize clinical trial designs and expand indication expansion opportunities; ultimately, supporting our goal of increasing the likelihood of matching the right drug for the right patient.

We were founded in November 2019 as a Delaware corporation under the name RBNC Therapeutics, Inc. We changed our name to Neumora Therapeutics, Inc. in October 2021. Our principal executive offices are located at 490 Arsenal Way, Suite 200, Watertown, Massachusetts 02472, and our telephone number is (857) 760-0900. Our website address is www.neumoratx.com.

In 2020, we acquired Abelian Therapeutics, Inc. (Abelian), BlackThorn Therapeutics, Inc. (BlackThorn), Syllable Life Sciences, Inc. (Syllable), Propellex Bio, Inc. (Propellex) and Alairion, Inc. (Alairion), each of which became our wholly owned subsidiary. As of June 30, 2023, we had dissolved Abelian, BlackThorn, Syllable, Propellex and Alairion.