Adaptive Phage Therapeutics Appoints Rob Casper as Vice President of Clinical Operations

GAITHERSBURG, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Adaptive Phage Therapeutics, Inc. (“APT”), a clinical-stage biotechnology company dedicated to providing therapies to treat infectious diseases, today announced the appointment of Rob Casper as Vice President of Clinical Operations. Mr. Casper will oversee execution of global clinical trials of APT’s phage bank therapy.

“I am pleased to welcome Rob to Adaptive Phage Therapeutics as our Vice President of Clinical Operations,” stated Greg Merril, APT’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “Mr. Casper has an impressive track record of successfully managing internal and external teams to advance complex multi-site clinical programs. Clinical operations are one of the biggest risk areas for any development-stage biotech. Under Rob’s leadership, we will accelerate our efforts to build a world-class clinical development infrastructure as we enter into advanced clinical testing of our adaptive phage therapy approach.”

“I am thrilled to join the APT team at such an exciting time, as the company expands into later-stage clinical trials and advances its novel therapeutic approach for patients fighting multi-drug resistant bacterial infections,” commented Rob Casper, APT’s Vice President of Clinical Operations. “There has been a notable reduction in antibiotic product development in recent years, and I am very excited to help advance clinical development of APT’s adaptive phage therapy to directly address specific indications of unmet need arising from the world’s ever-growing antimicrobial resistance crisis.”

Rob Casper previously served in clinical operation roles at multiple biotech companies, including most recently as Vice President of Clinical Operations at Altimmune and as Senior Director of Clinical Operations at Kolon TissueGene. Mr. Casper earned dual Master of Science degrees in Developmental Psychology and Clinical Counseling and Applied Psychology from The John Hopkins University.

About Adaptive Phage Therapeutics, Inc.

Adaptive Phage Therapeutics (APT) is a clinical-stage company advancing therapies to treat multi-drug resistant infections. APT has ongoing clinical trials to address substantial unmet patient needs in Prosthetic Joint Infection (PJI) and Diabetic Foot Osteomyelitis (DFO). APT also selectively provides investigational phage therapy, under FDA emergency Investigational New Drug allowance, to treat critically ill patients in which standard-of-care antibiotics have failed.

Traditional antibiotic approaches lose effectiveness over time due to bacteria’s inherent ability to evolve resistance. APT’s approach uniquely leverages an ever-growing library of systematically discovered, selected, catalogued, and curated bacteriophages (phages), which collectively provide broad coverage against many of the world’s highest priority antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Phages from the APT phage bank are matched to treat patient’s infections through a proprietary susceptibility assay that APT has teamed with Mayo Clinic Laboratories to commercialize on a global scale.

APT’s technology was originally developed at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by APT co-founder Carl R. Merril, MD CAPT USPHS (ret), and further advanced within a biodefense program of U.S. Department of Defense until APT acquired world-wide exclusive commercial rights in 2017.

For more information, visit http://www.aphage.com.