MILL VALLEY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NaNotics LLC, a nanomedical company focused on developing and commercializing NaNots™, a novel subtractive nanoparticle platform for treating disease by capturing and clearing pathogenic molecules from blood, today announced the appointment of Curtis Ruegg, Ph.D., a world-class developer of immune-modulating drugs and nanoparticles, as Chief Development Officer and Chief Operating Officer.
“Curtis is exactly who we need at this point in our company’s growth,” said Lou Hawthorne, CEO of NaNotics and the inventor of NaNots™, the subject of 12 granted patents to date. “We can now rapidly engineer NaNots against just about any target in blood, and deplete that target almost completely within minutes, without measurable toxicity. With Curtis onboard, we can begin progressing our priority NaNots to human studies and then market approval – which Curtis has done successfully in his prior positions. In addition to his deep experience designing advanced therapeutics, Curtis has the most important experience of all: recruiting and managing world-class scientific teams committed to developing new medicines that reduce human suffering – and generate value for the investors who make our work possible.”
“I am thrilled to join NaNotics and help bring this new paradigm of therapeutic intervention to the patients who need it,” said Dr. Ruegg. “Lou and the NaNotics team have conceived NaNots – a truly new class of medicine – and applied precision nanotechnology to develop an injectable therapeutic that depletes soluble factors driving a wide range of cancers and inflammatory diseases, without disrupting normal cell signaling the way conventional drugs do. I plan to draw on my breadth of past experiences developing novel and advanced drug modalities spanning nanomedicines, cell therapies, modified biologics and drug-device combinations, along with the tactical aspects of building therapeutic development teams and GMP manufacturing facilities, to support development, approval and commercialization of a broad pipeline of NaNots.”
About NaNotics LLC
NaNotics LLC is a mature preclinical stage company based in Mill Valley, CA, just north of San Francisco. The company has 12 granted patents on its NaNot™ nano-depletion platform with many more patents pending. The company is developing a pipeline of eight NaNots™ against a range of inflammatory and inhibitory targets driving multiple diseases representing significant unmet medical need.
NaNots™ are distinct from drug therapies in that they deplete soluble targets without engaging membrane forms of the same target, something drugs generally cannot do. NaNots against soluble tumor-generated immune inhibitors are under development for treating cancer, in collaboration with Mayo Clinic. The company is also developing NaNots against soluble inflammatory cytokines, which drive a broad range of vascular and autoimmune diseases – as well as sepsis, the greatest unmet medical need of all. One of the main advantages of NaNots™ over drugs is their expected safety profile. Multiple animal studies to date have shown no measurable NaNot™ toxicity – even at 25-100 times the planned dose in humans.
About Curtis Ruegg Ph.D.
Prior to joining NaNotics, Dr. Ruegg served as CEO at Amphivena Therapeutics, developing new therapeutics for cancer patients using their novel T cell engager platform, and as CEO of Parvus Therapeutics developing a novel nanomedicine platform targeting T-Reg cells for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. Prior to that, he served as Executive VP, Technical Operations at Revance Therapeutics where he established and managed the biologics development program, built and oversaw GMP manufacturing and R&D facilities from IND through Phase 3. Previously, he was Senior VP, Technical Operations at Cotherix, supporting the NDA filing and expedited FDA review and approval for VENTAVIS® (iloprost), a drug/ device combination. Dr. Ruegg also served in leadership roles at AP Cells where he lead development of a nanomedicine-based immunotherapeutic platform for treatment of cancer and built and managed a GMP manufacturing facility. He began his career at Dendreon as co-Inventor of Provenge® (sipuleucel-T) for the treatment of prostate cancer. Dr. Ruegg received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine pursuing research on retroviral-mediated immunosuppression and was a Cancer Research Institute Fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine working on novel immune cell surface receptors for therapeutic development.
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