Scrip spoke with Managing Director Julie Sunderland about Biomatics' new $300m fund. Also, Silicon Valley Bank reveals its surprising Leerink buy, Perceptive Advisors raises $675m, Roivant brings in another $200m, and cell and gene therapy financings surge in the third quarter.

Between 2010 and the first quarter of 2013, biopharma engaged in 70 deals involving neurodegenerative disease assets covering a wide variety of targets – possibly a consequence of uncertainty about the underlying pathophysiology. AstraZeneca was the top deal maker in the field even as it moved away from CNS as a core therapeutic area.

Vanderbilt University’s neuroscience research group reaches its latest agreement with a pharma, this one covering compounds that treat symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia by modulating a receptor in new ways.