BrainCells Raises $1M, Moving Ahead Without CEO Schoeneck or CSO Barlow

At this time last year, Luke reported that San Diego’s BrainCells Inc. had acquired the compound sabcomeline from London-based Proximagen, and planned to study the drug as a treatment for depression.

Just a couple of months earlier, we reported that BrainCells was at a crossroads after a clinical trial showed that its lead compound for treating depression didn’t work any better than a placebo in a mid-stage trial of 90 severely depressed patients. Now, judging from the company’s website, it appears those were the last two press releases the company has issued—and BrainCells is again regrouping.

After a long quiet spell, BrainCells disclosed on Aug. 1 that it has raised nearly $995,000 of a planned $14 million round that includes debt, options, and securities, according to a regulatory filing.

The filing doesn’t indicate how the company plans to spend the new money, and acting CEO Robert Williamson did not respond to questions submitted yesterday by e-mail. The profile of Williamson on BrainCells’s website says he has been involved in starting and assisting public and private companies through his consultancy, LaSalle Venture Advisers.

James Schoeneck, who had served as BrainCells CEO since 2005, apparently left the company some time ago. In April of this year, Schoeneck was named as the CEO of Depomed (NASDAQ: [[ticker:DEPO]]), a Menlo Park, CA-based specialty pharmaceutical company where he also has served as a director for nearly four years.

A spokeswoman for BrainCells confirmed this morning that the chief scientific officer, Carrolee Barlow, also has left the San Diego company. She had no additional details, however, and said she could offer no information in response to other questions submitted to the company.

In the eight years since BrainCells was founded, the company has raised at least $77 million from investors that include Bay City Capital, MedImmuneVentures, New Enterprise Associates, Oxford Bioscience Partners, Technology Partners, Pappas Ventures, NeuroVentures, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, Mizuho, and Alexandria Real Estate Equities.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.