Bexorg lands funding for platform that restores activity in postmortem brains to enhance drug discovery for neurodegenerative diseases.
New Haven-based biotech Bexorg has closed a $23 million Series A funding round to expand its whole-human brain research platform. With a mission to transform central nervous system drug discovery, the company’s approach is based on the key breakthrough of restoring molecular and metabolic activity to human brains, postmortem.
Founded in 2021 by Yale neuroscientists Dr Zvonimir Vrselja and Dr Nenad Sestan, Bexorg emerged from research that demonstrated it was possible to restore molecular and metabolic activity in postmortem mammalian brains. That work, first published in Nature in 2018, showed that cellular viability could be partially recovered in pig brains hours after death, without any restoration of consciousness.
With the goal of overcoming the limitations of animal and cell-based systems that have contributed to failure rates exceeding 95% in CNS drug trials, the company is now applying the approach to donated human brains to generate data for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other neurodegenerative conditions.
Maintaining cell metabolism
At the core of Bexorg’s technology is a perfusion system that circulates an artificial blood-like fluid through postmortem human brains, maintaining cell metabolism long enough to support drug testing and molecular profiling. The perfusate delivers oxygen and nutrients while removing waste, allowing researchers to observe how neurons and glial cells respond to experimental compounds. This data feeds into the company’s AI engine, which builds predictive models linking molecular mechanisms to drug effects.
Bexorg describes its approach as a “closed-loop” discovery system: experiments in perfused human brains train algorithms that then propose new hypotheses for in-silico testing, with results subsequently validated in the lab. The company’s work is conducted under an independent bioethics framework developed in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health and overseen by a board of ethics experts.
All brain tissue used in Bexorg’s experiments comes from donors who have given specific consent for their brains to be used in postmortem research. The removal process, which does not interfere with life-saving organ donation, is performed by surgeons who preserve the donor’s appearance and ensure the brain is isolated and transported intact for perfusion.
“Through our platform, using donated whole human brains, we restore specific molecular activities essential for drug discovery, while the higher-level brain functions are not restored — honoring each gift by generating a depth of knowledge that could not be gained otherwise,” said Vrselja, Bexorg’s CEO.
Collaborations underway
Bexorg’s approach allows researchers to measure the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of drugs in intact human brain tissue before any clinical trial. It provides data on target engagement, biomarker evolution, and molecular changes over time, potentially allowing more confident go/no-go decisions in development pipelines. In one application, the platform has been used to compare the activity of experimental Parkinson’s therapies in diseased versus healthy brains, mapping how candidate molecules interact with neural circuits.
The company has entered several collaborations to demonstrate the translational potential of its system. In 2024, it partnered with the University of Oxford and the UK Medical Research Council to explore gene therapy delivery for neurological diseases. Earlier this year, Bexorg announced a multi-program research collaboration with pharma company Biohaven to evaluate two preclinical drug candidates using its perfused-brain model. The studies are designed to generate mechanistic insights, including pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic relationships and biomarker profiles, to support Biohaven’s development programs.
Bexorg has now compiled hundreds of whole-brain datasets and is training large-scale AI models on petabytes of molecular data, creating what it calls a foundation model for human neurobiology. The goal is to develop a predictive system capable of identifying new drug targets and understanding disease mechanisms directly in the human brain.
The funding round, which brings the total raised by the Bexorg to $42.5 million, was led by Engine Ventures, with participation from Amplify Partners, Starbloom Capital, Connecticut Innovations, and E1 Ventures. Investors joining the company’s board include Ann DeWitt of Engine Ventures and David Beyer of Amplify Partners.
“It is inspiring to see novel approaches that just a few years ago would have seemed impossible become breakthrough technologies in one of our toughest disease areas,” said DeWitt. “We believe this approach will shorten discovery and development timelines, improve clinical trial success rates, and ultimately bring transformational CNS therapies to patients.”
According to Bexorg, the financing will support the scaling of its AI engine, expansion of internal CNS programs, and deepening of partnerships with pharmaceutical and academic collaborators.
