SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Tenaya Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing potentially curative treatments for heart disease, today announced that it has strengthened its leadership team with the appointment of Whittemore Tingley, M.D., Ph.D., as Chief Medical Officer, and Kee-Hong Kim, Ph.D., as Senior Vice President of Manufacturing and Technical Operations. The Company also bolstered its Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) with the addition of gene therapy expert Mark A. Kay, M.D., Ph.D.; cardiovascular genetics expert Elizabeth McNally, M.D., Ph.D.; and protein misfolding expert Jonathan Weissman, Ph.D.
“Tenaya has experienced significant momentum since we were founded in 2016. Now, with the addition of Drs. Tingley and Kim to our growing executive team, and with three world-renowned scientists who are leaders in their respective fields joining our SAB, we have added to our capabilities and are better positioned to execute on our goal of advancing multiple modalities to transform the treatment of heart disease,” said Faraz Ali, Chief Executive Officer of Tenaya Therapeutics. “Dr. Tingley brings critical experience in cardiovascular drug development and Dr. Kim brings extensive experience in AAV gene therapy manufacturing that we need in-house to advance our research into the clinic. We also look forward to tapping into the scientific expertise of Drs. Kay, McNally and Weissman to help Tenaya develop treatments for patients suffering from heart failure of various underlying causes.”
Leadership Team Additions
Dr. Tingley, prior to joining Tenaya Therapeutics, served as Vice President of Clinical Research, Cardiology, at Cytokinetics. Before that, he spent nine years at Genentech/Roche, where he held positions of increasing responsibility. Most recently, he was Therapeutic Area Lead for Cardiovascular and Metabolism Research and Early Development. Prior to that, he held a position in clinical R&D at CardioDx. Earlier in his career, Dr. Tingley was Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Cardiology Division at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and cared for patients as an attending cardiologist in the UCSF Cardiology Faculty Practice. He earned an A.B. from Brown University and an M.D. and a Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He completed internship and residency programs at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, a cardiology fellowship at UCSF, and post-doctoral research at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease.
Dr. Kim has more than a decade of experience in drug manufacturing. Prior to joining Tenaya Therapeutics, he served as Senior Vice President, Head of Technical Operations, at Agilis Biotherapeutics, where he was responsible for manufacturing gene therapy drug products and establishing reliable clinical and commercial supply chains. Prior to that, he was Head of the Gene Therapy Process Development and Global CMC Lead for Gene Therapy at Shire. After serving as Director of Process Development at Avalanche Biotechnologies, Dr. Kim ran a biopharma consulting firm for drug product delivery. Earlier in his career, he was a Senior Process Development Engineer at Dendreon, where he supported cGMP manufacturing for the immunotherapy PROVENGE. He received a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Colorado State University and completed post-doctoral training at Cornell University.
Scientific Advisory Board Additions
Dr. Kay is a leading researcher in the fields of gene therapy and adeno-associated virus (AAV) biology, including the identification of new AAV capsids. Dr. Kay is the Dennis Farrey Family Professor in Pediatrics, Head of the Division of Human Gene Therapy, and a professor in the Departments of Pediatrics and Genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is one of the founders of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy, served as its president from 2005-2006, and was the recipient of its Outstanding Investigator Award. Dr. Kay has organized many national and international conferences, including the first Gordon Conference related to gene therapy. He is currently the deputy editor of Human Gene Therapy and serves on the editorial boards of other peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Kay has a B.S. in physical sciences from Michigan State University, and a Ph.D. in developmental genetics and an M.D. from Case Western Reserve University.
Dr. McNally, a cardiologist with expertise in cardiac genetics, established one of the first cardiovascular genetics clinics in the United States. Her research focuses on understanding the genetic mechanism of cardiovascular disease and using genetic signals to drive therapy development. Dr. McNally is the Elizabeth J. Ward Professor of Genetic Medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, where she directs the Center for Genetic Medicine. Her translational work was recognized by an award from the Burroughs Wellcome Foundation and the Distinguished Clinical Scientist Award from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. She is the Vice Chair for the Council on Basic Cardiovascular Sciences of the American Heart Association and serves on the advisory boards for the Muscular Dystrophy Association and Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy. She is a past president of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and a member of the Association of American Physicians.
Dr. Weissman is a professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, UCSF Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program. Dr. Weissman's research team studies how cells ensure that proteins fold into their correct shape, as well as the role of protein misfolding in disease and normal physiology. His team also develops experimental and analytical approaches for exploring the organizational principles of biological systems and globally monitoring protein translation through ribosome profiling. A broad goal of his work is to bridge large-scale approaches and in-depth mechanistic investigations to reveal the information encoded within genomes. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
The other members of Tenaya’s SAB include:
- Deepak Srivastava, M.D., Co-Founder of Tenaya; President, Gladstone Institutes; The Younger Family Director, Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease; Director, Rodenberry Center for Stem Cell Biology and Medicine; and Professor, UCSF
- Eric Olson, Ph.D., Co-Founder of Tenaya; Founding Chair, Department of Molecular Biology, and Robert A. Welch Distinguished Chair and the Annie and Willie Nelson Professorship of Stem Cell Research, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
- Mark Fishman, M.D., Professor, Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, Harvard University; and Chief, Pathways Clinical Service, Massachusetts General Hospital
- Doug Mann, M.D., Lewin Chair and Professor of Medicine, Cell Biology and Physiology, and Chief of the Division of Cardiology, Washington University School of Medicine
About Tenaya Therapeutics
Tenaya Therapeutics is a privately-held biopharmaceutical company focused on developing potentially curative treatments for heart disease of various underlying causes. Headquartered in South San Francisco, Calif., Tenaya was founded in 2016 by world-leading scientists from the Gladstone Institute’s Cardiovascular Division and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Tenaya is addressing heart disease through three distinct and multi-modality platforms: a Target and Drug Discovery Platform, which uses isogenic iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes as disease models for genetically-defined cardiomyopathies; a Gene Therapy Platform, which enables the targeted delivery of therapeutic payloads to relevant cells in the heart using adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors; and a Regeneration Platform, which uses novel approaches to enable in vivo reprogramming of cardiac fibroblasts to cardiomyocytes in response to acute or chronic injury. For more information, please visit Tenaya’s website at www.tenayatherapeutics.com and LinkedIn page.