Privately held Cerevance Inc., of Boston, raised $45 million in a series B designed to propel the discovery and development of therapies for treating CNS diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Albuquerque, N.M.-based Sandia Labs received a $6 million grant from the NIH to build a prototype for a wearable brain scanner. The noninvasive functional brain imaging system will use optically pumped magnetometers (OPMs) to conduct more accurate magnetoencephalography (MEG), while improving accuracy, increasing comfort, reducing imaging costs, and enabling use in more patients.

During the first quarter of 2020, a total of 153 financings brought $13.2 billion into the med-tech industry, representing a 20% drop from the first quarter of 2019, but still significantly above all of the other quarters since 2017. The number of private financings appears to be climbing in comparison with recent years, and some large notes offerings have placed private raises of public companies on top. In contrast, IPOs and follow-on offerings are way down from previous quarters.

The Korea Export Import Bank (KEXIM) took a step toward fulfilling its mandate to finance Korean companies’ overseas expansion by seeking managers for a new ₩400 billion (US$328 million) fund.

Backers in Tango Therapeutics Inc.’s $60 million series B round represent “a group of really smart crossovers who normally don’t come in quite this early” and “hung in there” during some especially hard times on Wall Street recently, CEO Barbara Weber told BioWorld. “We were about to sign the term sheet the first time the market crashed, which was a little nerve-wracking.”