CraniUS Therapeutics announced that it raised $20 million in a Series B financing round to accelerate its development of NeuroPass.
NeuroPass is a fully implantable, skull-embedded platform. The Baltimore-based company designed it to bypass the blood-brain barrier (BBB). It could enable targeted drug delivery and monitoring in the brain.
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CraniUS has NeuroPass under development as a multi-product platform, targeting three complementary products in its initial roadmap. Altogether, the company hopes to progressively expand therapeutic capability. It aims to evolve cranial implants from passive reconstructive hardware into an active therapeutic interface capable of supporting long-term outpatient care.
The Series B round follows a $20 million Series A round in 2022. CraniUS said its latest funding includes $19 million from private investors, plus $1 million in non-dilutive funding from the State of Maryland. The company expects the new capital to support operations into 2027. It also expects it to go toward regulatory submissions, manufacturing scale-up and product testing toward future commercialization.
Dr. Chad Gordon, a Johns Hopkins neuroplastic surgeon, founded CraniUS to find a way to bring therapies to the brain, crossing the BBB.
“This is not an incremental advance—it represents a fundamentally new approach to treating neurological disease and brain cancer,” said Dr. Gordon, founder and executive chair of CraniUS Therapeutics. “We set out to build a platform that could help address a therapeutic barrier that has limited care for decades.”
Other companies currently target the BBB for drug delivery purposes. That includes Carthera and its SonoCloud, device that emits ultrasound to temporarily increase the permeability of blood vessels in the brain, improving therapeutic molecule delivery. Another company, Cordance, develops an ultrasound device designed to open the BBB.
