Kevin Forrest of 5AM Ventures, former Achaogen founder and CEO Kevin Judice, and H. Shaw Warren, of Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital. Forrest has joined Cidara as chief operating officer and Judice is serving as chief scientific officer. Warren will join Cidara’s scientific advisory board.
Stein joined the company earlier this year as CEO.
In today’s statement, he says, “Our vision is to apply the versatile Cloudbreak small molecule immunotherapy platform to treat patients with compromised immune systems across multiple therapeutic areas. We will initially target patients with compromised immune systems resulting from cancer therapy, bone marrow transplants, and solid organ transplants where the risk of death from invasive fungal infections, even on best available care, often exceeds 50 percent. Our objective is to rewrite the book on how such infections are treated.”
“Current treatment options for patients whose immune systems are severely attenuated by cancer and transplant treatments are typically unsuccessful without reversal of the immune defect,” said Kieren Marr, professor of medicine and oncology and director of the oncology, transplant and infectious diseases program at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and advisor to Cidara. “The Cloudbreak platform’s novel approach of redirecting the immune system may offer major advances in developing treatments for these patients.”
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
View all posts by Bruce V. Bigelow
