Our Story - Ovid Therapeutics

our mission

Ovid seeks to deliver medicines that create new possibilities and more good days for people with epilepsies and brain conditions.

Our team is curious and persevering in our mission to serve patient communities. We strive to operate with the utmost integrity in every decision and action our company takes.

Read about how we’re guided by our values »

our focus

Ovid Therapeutics is a biopharmaceutical company striving to calm the storm that causes seizures by developing new medicines for neurological and brain conditions. Today, nearly 50 million people across the world live with epilepsies and seizures. Approximately half these patients take five or more medicines, yet they still experience seizures. Additionally, some current anti-seizure medicines can also be hard to tolerate as they cause side effects that can diminish overall quality of life.

Ovid is developing a pipeline of small molecule medicines

Nearly 50 million people across the world live with epilepsies and seizures

Potential first-in-class or best-in-class mechanisms of action

Ovid Therapeutics Inc. is a New York-based biopharmaceutical company dedicated to developing small molecule medicines for brain conditions and symptoms caused by excess neural excitability. Ovid is advancing a pipeline of novel targeted small molecule candidates that modulate the intrinsic and extrinsic factors involved in neuronal hyperexcitability causative of multiple neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders.

Ovid is developing: OV329, a next-generation GABA-aminotransferase inhibitor, as a potential therapy for treatment-resistant seizures and other undisclosed indications; and is developing OV4071 and other candidates within a library of compounds that directly activate the KCC2 transporter for multiple CNS disorders.

our founding

Ovid was founded in April 2014, in the living room of Dr. Matthew During. Dr. During was an acclaimed neuroscientist known for pioneering early gene therapy and authoring more than 250 scientific publications. Sitting across from him was Dr. Jeremy Levin, a physician, academic and executive, who had just left his role as the global CEO of Teva Pharmaceuticals, the largest generic medicines company in the world. At the time, Levin was expected to take a role at another large pharmaceutical company.

Yet, after many hours of discussion, Levin concluded that he and Matt shared the view: neurology was the next medical frontier that was ripe for medical breakthroughs. Too many patients and families were waiting for medicines and too little progress was on the horizon.

Subsequently, the two set out to create a company to treat rare neurological conditions, specifically focused on conditions that other, much larger pharmaceutical companies had ignored or failed to develop.

When it came time to name the company, a poem by the Roman poet, Ovid, was the inspiration. The poem was “The Metamorphoses”, which – underscored both the change in medical science and the change that the founders sought to achieve for patients.