D&D Pharmatech propelled itself to the front ranks of privately held biotech firms by raising $137 million in a series B round to develop new therapies for Parkinson’s disease and fibrosis, as well as a series of imaging biomarkers for neurodegenerative disease and cancer.

The company is part of a nascent biotech hub in the Baltimore region, based around the longstanding biomedical research strength of Johns Hopkins University. Other recent Johns Hopkins spinouts include liquid biopsy firms Thrive Earlier Detection, which closed a $110 million A round in May, and Personal Genome Diagnostics, a genome analysis company, which raised $75 million in a B round last year. Although the university invariably tops the US National Institutes of Health’s research funding league, it has historically lagged its peer institutions in terms of commercial biotech spin-outs. “It just really wasn’t a focus of the institution before,” says Christy Wyskiel, head of Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures, the university’s research commercialization arm. But an explicit strategy put in place five years ago to boost the biotech innovation ecosystem is now starting to bear fruit.

D&D is organized as a holding company, with research personnel in the United States and Korea, and three operating subsidiaries: Neuraly, which is developing therapies for neurodegenerative conditions; Theraly Fibrosis, which is focused on drugs for fibrosis; and Precision Molecular Inc. (PMI), which is developing diagnostic imaging tools for neuroinflammation and cancer based on positron-emission tomography (PET).

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