LYON, France--(BUSINESS WIRE)--ENYO Pharma, a private clinical stage biotechnology company developing innovative drug candidates, today announced the appointment of Jonathan Lieber as Chief Financial Officer. He will succeed Pascale Boissel, who is leaving the Company for personal reasons.
Jacky Vonderscher, PhD, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, stated "I would like to thank Pascale for her many contributions to the Company. She has been a valuable member of the team and I am confident that we would not be where we are today without her leadership, and guidance. We are very pleased that she will continue to work with us for a short time to ensure a seamless transition."
Dr. Vonderscher continued, “We are very pleased to have Jon join us as our new CFO. He is an accomplished executive with a proven track record of financial and operational leadership in the biopharmaceutical industry. His experience in building and financing biotechnology companies together with his prior investment banking experience, makes him an important addition to the executive leadership team and he will be extremely valuable as we seek to advance our product pipeline. We expect that Jon will play a critical role in our efforts to fund the growth of the company.”
Jonathan Lieber is a seasoned executive with 25 years of experience in financial and executive management at emerging growth life science companies and in investment banking. During his career he has raised more than $325 million of equity and debt in public and private securities offerings, including a $110 million IPO at Altus Pharmaceuticals, and led strategic and business development transactions including the successful sale of Xcellerex to GE Healthcare. He currently serves as a Managing Director of Danforth Advisors and most recently served as CFO of Histogenics Corporation, a publicly-traded cell therapy company developing products for the orthopedics market. He received a BS in Business Administration and Finance from Boston University and an MBA in Finance from New York University Stern School of Business.
“ENYO’s innovative technology platform has already demonstrated its ability to generate multiple proprietary compounds that may enable the treatment of unmet medical needs in a variety of therapeutic areas,” said Jonathan Lieber. "I am pleased to be joining the Company at such an exciting time and I look forward to working with the leadership team to finance and grow the business with a goal of bringing novel products, such as EYP001, to patients."
Clinical Pipeline Update
ENYO Pharma also provided a pipeline update today with a focus on EYP001 (Vonafexor, proposed INN), the Company’s FXR agonist that is currently in Phase II clinical development in both Hepatitis B (HBV) and Nonalcoholic Steatohepatitis (NASH).
- EYP001–201 is a double-blind, randomized, controlled study in virologically suppressed chronic HBV patients of EYP001 in combination with a nucleoside analog (NA) to assess both safety and the rate of functional cure (under open IND). Target enrollment for the trial is 50 patients with a planned treatment duration of 16 weeks. The Company expects to report data from this trial in the second half of 2020.
- EYP001–202 is a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study to assess the safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics, and efficacy of EYP001 in patients with NASH. Enrollment began under IND in Q2 2019 with a target enrollment of 160 patients that will be treated for 12 weeks. The Company expects to report data from this trial in H2 2020 (NCT 03812029).
- EYP001–203 is an open-label, randomized, placebo-controlled study in treatment-naive / virologically non-suppressed chronic Hepatitis B patients to assess the rate of functional cure of EYP001 administered with the current standard of care consisting of a nucleoside analog and pegylated interferon. Target enrollment for the trial is 30 patients with a planned treatment duration of 16 weeks. The Company expects to report data from this trial in the second half of 2020.
- There are also several additional clinical pharmacology studies ongoing to strengthen the EYP001 pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamics profile and provide further differentiation of the compound.
About ENYO Pharma
ENYO Pharma is a privately held, clinical stage biopharmaceutical company incorporated in January 2014 and headquartered in Lyon, France. The Company’s most advanced compound, EYP001, is a small molecule (non-Bile Acid FXR agonist) therapeutic in Phase II clinical development for the treatment of Chronic Hepatitis B and NASH. EYP001 and the Company’s discovery programs are based on a proprietary technology platform that uses a virus bio-mimetism approach to enable the rapid discovery of first-in-class drug candidates with good safety profiles. ENYO’s founders are a mix of virus-host protein interactions experts from the French Infectiology Research Center in Lyon and pharmaceutical industry executives with an impressive track record in drug development.
For more information on ENYO and EYP001, please visit http://www.enyopharma.com/.
