Clockwise from left: Vaderis CEO Nicholas Benedict, senior medical director Damien Picard and CSO Pierre Saint-Mezard
Backed by Medicxi, Novartis vets launch rare blood disorder biotech with fresh take on drug class used in cancers
In 2017, two Novartis clinicians — Pierre Saint-Mezard and Damien Picard — approached Nicholas Benedict, who’d left Novartis in 2007 and went on to head a series of biotechs, with an idea: use Akt inhibitors, typically used to treat cancers, for rare diseases that cause blood vessel malformations.
The three of them founded Vaderis Therapeutics in 2019 out of Basel, Switzerland, with CHF 18 million (just under $19 million USD) in backing from Medicxi Ventures, and are launching from stealth today as they take their idea, now in drug form, into the clinic for an 80-patient proof-of-concept study.
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