Travecta Therapeutics Appoints Charles S. Ryan as President and Chief Executive Officer

Travecta Therapeutics, Pte Ltd. incorporated in Singapore on 7th April 2017, a preclinical stage biopharmaceutical company pioneering a portfolio of product candidates engineered to cross the blood-brain-barrier, today announced the appointment of Charles S. Ryan, JD, PhD as President and Chief Executive Officer. Dr. Ryan recently served as Chief Executive Officer and Director of Neurotrope, Inc. In his new role, Dr. Charles Ryan will work closely with the scientific team to develop novel therapeutics to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing patients suffering from pain and debilitating brain disorders. The company's current development plan anticipates its lead compound candidate for pain will be first administered to humans during the first quarter of 2022.

"Travecta is at a major inflection point in its evolution, leveraging recent scientific insights in our platform technology mVECTA™ to transport drugs across the blood brain barrier. With Dr. Ryan as CEO, we are extremely well positioned to execute on our multiple initiatives to navigate the many potential opportunities for our platform technology," said David L. Silver, Co-Founder of Travecta and Professor and Deputy Director in the Signature Research Program in Cardiovascular & Metabolic Diseases at the Duke-NUS Medical School. "We are excited to have Dr. Ryan join our team. His experience in drug development and commercialization of drugs, combined with his track record of successful strategic transactions, will help guide the development of a range of drugs that can be engineered through Travecta's novel technology," said Bruno de Pampelonne, Director of Travecta Therapeutics Pte Ltd. 

"Travecta Therapeutics presents a unique opportunity to build a company with a platform technology that can deliver drugs to the brain, offering one of the most promising therapeutic approaches to managing pain and improving cognition in patients with a variety of Central Nerves System (CNS) disorders and neurodegenerative disease," said Dr. Ryan, "I am honored to have an opportunity to lead Travecta and am looking forward to recruiting an experienced management team comprised of individuals who are committed to the company's mission to develop novel therapeutics that can improve the lives of patients suffering from pain and other cognitive and debilitating illnesses."

Dr. Ryan brings an extensive background in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. Most notably, he served as Senior Vice President and Chief Intellectual Property Counsel at Forest Laboratories (now AbbVie) for more than 10 years, where he managed several intellectual property estates. Dr. Ryan worked closely with the commercial and development teams as well as the business development teams at Forest. Most recently, he served as CEO and Director of Neurotrope, Inc., a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company leveraging Bryostatin-1 and its analogues to discover and develop targeted, novel regenerative therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases and developmental disorders. Still prior, Dr. Ryan served as President, CEO and Director of Orthobond, Inc., a biotechnology company that has developed proprietary antimicrobial nanosurfaces with broad applications in the medical device industry.

About Travecta Therapeutics

Travecta Therapeutics is a biopharmaceutical company developing a broad portfolio of product candidates engineered to cross the blood-brain-barrier. The company's proprietary platform mVECTA™ allows the company to screen and develop product candidates that can cross the blood-brain barrier targeting novel and untapped neurological pathways. Travecta's mVECTA™ proprietary platform is built upon a deep understanding of the Mfsd2a transporter protein and its function at the blood-brain-barrier as well as in other key physio-pathological conditions discovered by Dr. David Silver. The company is working to validate its hypothesis that new chemical entities discovered through mVECTA™ have significant advantages over existing therapies and will allow the company to address large patient populations with conditions that were previously hard to treat using existing modalities. Travecta focuses on biological pathways that have been clinically validated but where key biological targets have not been drugged or have been inadequately drugged due to the BBB challenge. To date, we have leveraged the mVECTA™ platform to design and test novel molecules with high brain penetration focused in the areas of neuropathic pain, neuro-inflammation and neuro-oncology.