THE WOODLANDS, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Fuzionaire Theranostics, Inc. (“Fuzionaire Tx”) announced today that Li Boynton and Klaus Kopka, PhD have joined the company’s Board of Directors and Advisory Board, respectively, supporting the company’s growth into clinical development.
Ms. Boynton joins the Board of Directors following a decade in healthcare finance. She was most recently a biopharma equity analyst at JPMorgan Asset Management, one of the largest investment platforms in biopharma globally, where she spent over six years investing in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and specialty pharmaceuticals across a broad range of US portfolios. Previously, Ms. Boynton held investment roles at Guggenheim Partners and Healthcare Royalty Partners following undergraduate immunology and proteomics research at Yale, where she completed her B.S. in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology.
Dr. Kopka joins the Advisory Board as a full professor in Bioinorganic and Radiopharmaceutical Chemistry at Technical University Dresden, Germany, and Director of the Institute of Radiopharmaceutical Cancer Research, HZDR, Germany. Previously, he held a full professorship at Ruprecht-Karls-University of Heidelberg and was head of the Division of Radiopharmaceutical Chemistry at the German Cancer Research Center, DKFZ, in Heidelberg.
Dr. Kopka is a co-inventor of fluorine-18-PSMA-1007, or Radelumin®, and lutetium-177-PSMA-617, or Pluvicto®. Novartis’s Pluvicto, for patients with PSMA+ metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC), is the first and to date only approved PSMA-targeted radioligand therapy.
Fuzionaire Tx adds Ms. Boynton’s experience in financial markets and investing in public and private biopharmaceutical companies, and Dr. Kopka’s expertise in radiopharmaceuticals in clinical and academic settings prior to commercial launches, as the company’s GRPR-targeting radiopharmaceuticals advance into first-in-patient tests at medical centers in Germany.
Supporting the company’s GRPR-focused research and development, collaborators of Fuzionaire Tx at McGill University and McMaster University have been awarded a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). The grant will expand the company’s developmental work on GRPR-targeting theranostic radiopharmaceuticals using the HetSiFA® platform.
The company’s heteroaromatic silicon-fluoride acceptors, or HetSiFAs, are modular radiolabeling moieties that enable rapid prototyping of peptide-based theranostics, tunable albumin binding to optimize biodistribution, manufacture of fluorine-18 PET companions at large scale, and chemically identical therapeutic and diagnostic pairs. The company’s HetSiFA-based radioligand therapies use actinium-225 and other leading alpha- and beta-emitting radionuclides.
About Fuzionaire Theranostics
Fuzionaire Theranostics is a radiopharmaceutical company on a mission to make better and more accessible theranostic treatments for people with cancer. With origins in Nobel laureate Robert Grubbs' lab at Caltech, the company's patented HetSiFA® platform enables rapid development of radioligand therapies and companion PET diagnostics, and offers manufacturing advantages in a clinical setting. The company’s pipeline addresses pressing clinical needs for several types of cancer, beginning with cancers in which gastrin-releasing peptide receptor (GRPR) is expressed, including metastatic prostate cancer.
For more, visit us at: www.fuzionairetx.com
