BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Vedanta Biosciences, pioneering the development of a new class of therapies designed to modulate the human microbiome, today announced the appointment Daniel E. Couto as Senior Vice President of Process Development and Manufacturing and named Jeremiah Faith, Ph.D., from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, to its Scientific Advisory Board.
Couto joins Vedanta as Senior Vice President of Process Development and Manufacturing and will work out of the Company’s new headquarters and research and development facility in Cambridge, MA, including a state-of-the-art Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) facility for the production of live bacterial drugs. Couto has 25 years of experience in biotechnology, biologics drug development and cGMP manufacturing, including at Merck Sharp Dohme Biologics UK (former Avecia Biologics) where he served as Vice President of Commercial Manufacturing Operations and was responsible for late stage and commercial manufacturing operations. In addition, Couto has held senior positions with several biotech companies including Nuvelo, Genzyme Transgenics and Advanced Biosystems and, most recently, was Senior Vice President of Manufacturing and Facilities Operations at ContraFect Corporation where he was responsible for all CMC, Supply Chain, QA and Facilities.
Vedanta also named Jeremiah Faith, Ph.D. to its Scientific Advisory Board. Dr. Faith is Assistant Professor, Clinical Immunology and Genetics and Genomic Sciences, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, where his work focuses on the manipulation of the gut microbiota, the interactions between our gut microbes and our immune system, and the development of new computational and experimental technologies to better model and assay the interactions between our gut microbes and our health. He has recently authored multiple high impact publications in Science, Science Translational Medicine and PNAS studying microbe-host relationships using bacterial consortia, the stability of the human microbiota and its response to diet, and bacterial culture methods.
Vedanta Biosciences is focused on the discovery, development and manufacturing of drugs based on live commensal microbes. The Company is advancing a pipeline of product candidates designed to treat infectious disease, immune tolerance, inflammation and immuno-oncology, which have been developed using a proprietary technology platform that enables mining of the human microbiome for potent pharmaceutical products.
About Vedanta
Vedanta
Biosciences is pioneering development of a novel class of therapies
designed to modulate pathways of interaction between the human
microbiome and the host immune system. Founded by PureTech
Health (PureTech Health plc, PRTC.L) and a group of world-renowned
experts in immunology and microbiology, Vedanta Biosciences is a leader
in the microbiome field with capabilities that potentially enable
discovery, development and manufacturing of drugs based on live
commensal microbes. Using its proprietary technology platform, Vedanta
Biosciences has isolated a vast collection of human-associated bacterial
strains and characterized how the immune system recognizes and responds
to these microbes and has generated a pipeline of drug candidates in
development for infectious disease, immune tolerance, inflammation and
immuno-oncology.
Vedanta’s scientific co-founders have pioneered the fields of innate immunity, Th17 and regulatory T cell biology, and include Dr. Ruslan Medzhitov (Professor of Immunobiology at Yale), Dr. Alexander Rudensky (tri-institutional Professor at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute, the Rockefeller University and Cornell University), Dr. Dan Littman (Professor of Molecular Immunology at NYU), Dr. Brett Finlay (Professor at the University of British Columbia) and Dr. Kenya Honda (Professor, School of Medicine, Keio University). Vedanta’s Board of Directors includes Board Chairman Christopher Viehbacher, Managing Partner at Gurnet Point Capital and former CEO and Member of the Board of Directors of Sanofi; Dr. Bennett Shapiro, former Executive Vice President of Merck; Dr. John LaMattina, former President of research and development at Pfizer and David Steinberg, Co-Founder of Vedanta and Executive Vice President at PureTech.
Forward Looking Statement
This press release contains
statements that are or may be forward-looking statements, including
statements that relate to the company's future prospects, developments
and strategies. The forward-looking statements are based on current
expectations and are subject to known and unknown risks and
uncertainties that could cause actual results, performance and
achievements to differ materially from current expectations, including,
but not limited to, those risks and uncertainties described in the risk
factors included in the regulatory filings for PureTech Health plc.
These forward-looking statements are based on assumptions regarding the
present and future business strategies of the company and the
environment in which it will operate in the future. Each forward-looking
statement speaks only as at the date of this press release. Except as
required by law and regulatory requirements, neither the company nor any
other party intends to update or revise these forward-looking
statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or
otherwise.
