Inhaled pharmaceuticals developer Pulmatrix has named former Pfizer VP Michael Yeadon as an advisor to its management team and as the newest member of its scientific advisory board. Yeadon joined Pfizer in 1995 and was most recently that company’s Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer of the Allergy and Respiratory Unit. He is currently an industry consultant.
Pulmatrix CEO Robert Connelly said of the appointment: “We are delighted to have a leader in the respiratory field of Dr. Yeadon’s caliber join our already strong SAB. Drawing on his decades of practical and scientific experience in respiratory drug discovery and commercialization, we plan to engage Dr. Yeadon’s counsel on scientific, clinical, and business strategies, plans, and execution. Having him on board will accelerate our pipeline, with its lead compound focused on chronic respiratory diseases like COPD and CF, while strengthening the very foundation of our scientific and business underpinnings.”
Commenting on one of Pulmatrix’s inhalation technology platforms, Yeadon said: “From a fundamental physiological principle involving the role of calcium concentrations in airway surface liquid, the Pulmatrix team has made a series of remarkable discoveries. iCALM appears to have the credentials for pleiotropic actions completely unlike anything previously described. iCALM is a simple, inhalable therapy, projected to address the three key pathomechanistic concerns for all those engaged in respiratory R&D: inflammation, host-defense and modulation of airway mucus.”
Yeadon also touted the company’s dry powder formulation platform: “For decades, just three basic methods existed for creating inhalable drugs: nebulised solutions, lactose-based dry powders and metered-dose inhalers. Like many in respiratory R&D, I thought that was all there could be. But iSPERSE’s small, dense particle technology appears to add another and valuable option. Its potential could be huge and not only for existing drugs. As a drug discoverer, I am aware of a number of areas of target-rich biological processes for which drugs could be invented, which may not easily fit into the existing inhalation drug-delivery technologies. Rather than discard such candidates, or worse, the targets themselves, I’d recommend innovators take a close look at iSPERSE. If this becomes proven in clinic, it could become the new gold standard”.
Pulmatrix, which was founded in 2003, has been very active in 2011, launching its iSperse technology at ISAM 2011 and recently announcing that it has raised $14 million for development of its lead product, for which it presented preclinical data at the 2011 European Respiratory Society meeting.
Read the Pulmatrix press release.
