A UCSF spinout is growing neuronal stem cells to transplant into the brain, for potential use in treating epilepsy, spinal cord injury, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease – and investors are listening. Because one thing that differentiates Neurona Therapeutics is that its stem cells turn exclusively into interneuron cells – which are less likely to be tumorigenic than other IPS cells.

The company has raised $7.6 million of a proposed $24.3 million round, according to a regulatory filing. But the company’s staying a touch under the radar – it lacks a website, and ’tis the season for calls to the company to remain unanswered.

But funding for the six-year-old company comes from 11 investors. Listed on the document’s contact pages are Tim Kutzkey and David Goeddel, both partners at early stage healthcare venture firm The Column Group – giving some insight into who the startup’s investors are.

Also listed is Leo Guthart, a managing partner at New York private equity firm TopSpin Partner, and Arnold Kriegstein, director of the UCSF developmental and stem cell biology program.

Kriegstein and his UCSF colleagues filed a patent for the in vitro production of medial ganglionic eminence (MGE) precursor cells – which are, in essence, immature cells that morph into nerve cells. The work that led to the patent was funded by the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, the NIH and the Osher Foundation.

“We think this one type of cell may be useful in treating several types of neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders in a targeted way,” Kriegstein said in a UCSF statement last year.

Neurona Therapeutics’ scientific backers collaborated on a paper on these MGE cells in Cell Stem Cell, finding that mouse models closely mimicked human cells in neural cell development – and that human cells can successfully be transplanted into mouse brains. UCSF writes: