Roche shelved these psychiatry drugs. So its former head of neuro cooked up some new plans — and raised $59M for his startup
As the former head of neuroscience product development at Roche for a decade, George Garibaldi can personally vouch for the quality of what the Swiss pharma giant does. But having worked on psychiatric disorders, he also knew way too well the downside of a field where animal models were a poor prediction of how drugs would perform in humans.
So when he caught word that Roche was putting part of its psychiatry pipeline on the shelf, Garibaldi, by then running his own consultancy, immediately took interest in licensing those compounds. He’d go down a slightly different direction, at a startup eventually named Noema Pharma.
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