Telum Therapeutics, a biotechnology company that develops innovative antimicrobial drugs to treat infectious diseases caused by multidrug-resistant bacteria, has announced today the appointment of Professor Vincent A. Fischetti as chairman of its Scientific Advisory Board (SAB).
- Professor Vincent A. Fischetti is the inventor of phage lysins as a new therapeutic and an alternative to conventional antibiotics.
- He is a Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Bacterial Pathogenesis and Immunology at the Rockefeller University in New York.
Telum Therapeutics, a biotechnology company that develops innovative antimicrobial drugs to treat infectious diseases caused by multidrug-resistant bacteria, has announced today the appointment of Professor Vincent A. Fischetti as chairman of its Scientific Advisory Board (SAB).
Vincent A. Fischetti is a Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Bacterial Pathogenesis and Immunology at the Rockefeller University in New York (USA). With a prestigious scientific career spanning more than 50 years, his main areas of research are bacterial pathogenesis, lysin therapy, vaccine development, and bacterial surface molecules. Professor Fischetti’s laboratory was the first to use phage lysins as a novel and effective therapeutic. He was the first scientist to clone and sequence the first surface protein on a gram-positive bacteria, the M protein gene from S. pyogenes, and determine its unique coiled-coil structure. His laboratory was also instrumental to our understanding of the mechanism by which surface proteins are attached in gram-positive bacteria.
He is a member of the American Society for Microbiology, the National Academy of Inventors (as a researcher with over 30 patents) and the New York Academy of Sciences. He has received the NIH Research Career Development Award and two 10-year NIH MERIT Awards from the United States National Institutes of Health.
“It is an honor and a privilege for Telum Therapeutics to have Professor Vincent A. Fischetti join our SAB. His knowledge, experience and guidance in using phage lysins and derivatives to treat and prevent bacterial infections will be extremely valuable in helping us continue expanding the capacities of our APEXp® technology platform and advancing in its therapeutic applications,” explains Dr Roberto Díez-Martínez, CEO and co-founder of Telum Therapeutics.
“Professor Fischetti was my mentor during my PhD at the Rockefeller University and the Spanish National Research Council, and I am thrilled to be working with him again on this exciting project: Telum Therapeutics,” highlights Díez-Martínez.
“I am honored to be the chair of Telum Therapeutic’s SAB and looking forward to helping the company move lysins into the public domain as the first alternative to antibiotic,” says Professor Fischetti.
The other members of the Telum Therapeutics Scientific Advisory Board are Professor Willard Dere, associate vicepresident for Research at the University of Utah School of Medicine; Dr Benito Almirante, Head of the Infectious Diseases Service at Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona; Dr Emilio Bouza, Professor emeritus of Medicine at the Complutense University of Madrid; Dr Rafael Cantón, Director of the Microbiology Department at Ramón y Cajal University Hospital in Madrid; and Alastair Waugh, independent consultant on Analytics and Chemistry, Manufacturing and Controls (CMC) for the biopharmaceutical industry.