Policy & Regulation
Immusoft Names Hayes as Chief Scientific Officer
17 July 2019 - - US-based cell therapy company Immusoft Corp has appointed Robert Hayes, Ph.D., as chief scientific officer, the company said.
With nearly two decades of biologics discovery and development experience, Dr. Hayes will lead Immusoft's preclinical research and spearhead the near-term advancement of ISP-001 for the treatment of Mucopolysaccharidosis type I (MPS I), and additional Immune System Programming candidates into clinical development.
With experience working in both biotech start-ups and large pharmaceutical companies, Dr. Hayes has a proven track record for building teams around new scientific concepts and technologies, including transposon systems, cancer vaccines, and bispecific monoclonal antibodies.
He also has significant experience in forming partnerships to advance the development and application of novel therapeutic platforms like the one between Janssen and Centyrex.
Hayes was previously Head of Biologics at Amgen Inc. (NASDAQ: AMGN), a multinational biopharmaceutical company, where he was responsible for a leadership managing a team of over 160 scientists strategic direction and operational management of Amgen's biologics preclinical discovery and biotherapeutics pipeline and was a member of the Discovery Research Executive Management Team.
Hayes' responsibilities included large molecule lead identification, biologics optimization, the transition to upstream process development and manufacturing.
Prior to Amgen, Hayes served as vice president and Venture Leader of Centyrex, a biotech Venture within Janssen R and D, focused on the development of small alternative scaffold proteins.
He previously served as Senior director of Protein Engineering at Johnson and Johnson and director of Antibody Engineering at Xencor.
Dr. Hayes holds a Ph.D. in Protein Biochemistry from the Imperial College London, where he was the Royal College of Science Scholar and a Royal Society University Research Fellow.
He completed his postdoctoral research at the Imperial College of London and at the University California at Berkeley.
Immusoft's proprietary ISP platform technology is a gene modified cell therapy approach that uses a clinically validated, non-viral vector that aims to safely and reliably insert functional genes into immune cells.
Once administered back into the patient, a subset of ISP modified cells are expected to reside within survival niches in the body, continuously producing gene-encoded protein(s).
The platform's broad utility to produce a wide range of therapeutic protein classes (e.g. antibodies, signaling proteins, and enzymes), has the potential to disrupt the current standard of care for many diseases requiring protein injections or infusions, including many to address orphan diseases.
Mucopolysaccharidosis type I (MPS I) is a rare, lethal childhood genetic disease that affects the body's ability to produce IDUA (alpha-L-iduronidase), which is an essential enzyme that helps to break down long-chain sugars inside cells.
When the sugar chains cannot be broken down and disposed of, they accumulate in the cells and cause progressive damage. In its most severe form, and if left untreated, children affected rarely live longer than ten years after diagnosis.
Immusoft Corp.'s mission is to treat diseases using its breakthrough technology platform called Immune System Programming. The technology modifies a patient's B cells and instructs the cells to produce gene-encoded medicines (biologics).
The B cells that are reprogrammed using ISP become miniature drug factories that are expected to survive in patients for many years. Immusoft Corp. is based in Seattle, Washington.
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