CNS Therapeutics Xchange
East Coast, Boston
May 18, 2022
Welcome to hubXchange’s East Coast Hybrid CNS Therapeutics Xchange 2022, bringing together executives from pharma and biotech to address and find solutions to the key issues faced in developing CNS therapies.
Discussion topics will cover Novel Targets, Preclinical, Clinical Studies and Drug Delivery.
Take advantage of this unique highly interactive meeting format designed for maximum engagement, collaboration and networking with your peers.
Please note this is an In-Person meeting with a hybrid option so participants can also join virtually.
VENUE DETAILS: Hilton Boston Woburn Hotel, 2 Forbes Road, Woburn MA 01801
Novel Targets
8:30 – 9:00am
Decentralized Clinical Trials Are Here to Stay
- How the clinical landscape has looked prior to COVID-19
- Technology has been the catalyst for change in clinical research
- How the industry projects to grow in 2022
Manager, Program Development Neurology & Regenerative Medicine Center of Excellence, Biorasi
Ruslan Gorsky is a manager within the program development team at Biorasi, an award winning CRO headquartered in Miami, Florida. Ruslan and his team focus predominantly on Neurological clinical trials, ranging from Neurodevelopmental to Neurodegenerative studies across all clinical phases. He provides pharmaceutical companies tailored strategies that solidify clinical trial success by focusing on decentralized processes and engagement with key opinion leaders as well as clinical research centers. This engagement ensures the client receives a strategy that synthesizes time, risk and cost for their clinical trial across multiple stakeholders. In addition, Ruslan and the team provide continual support throughout the duration of the study, making any necessary adjustments to facilitate compliance and competitive recruitment. Throughout his time at Biorasi, Ruslan has been involved in numerous, complex phase II and phase III clinical trials in diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and ALS involving groundbreaking biological investigational products and cell therapies.
9:05 – 10:05am
Opportunities from emerging therapeutic modalities: Target selection in an evolving druggability landscape
- Re-evaluation of what we can target in the CNS to develop medicines
- Therapeutic modalities most impactful to the target space of disease in the brain
- Where is genetic validation and human biology powering confidence in the next generation of targets?
- What CNS disorders will gene editing be best suited to address?
Director of Target Biology, Rgenta Therapeutics
Sam Hasson is currently the Director of Target Biology at Rgenta Therapeutics with a focus on the discovery of therapies for CNS diseases via modulation of RNA processing. Previously, he was an Associate Director at Voyager Therapeutics (Cambridge, Massachusetts). A major aim of his work at Voyager was the development of AAV-based gene therapy for the CNS to transform the treatment of unmet medical needs. Prior to joining Voyager, Sam led groups within Amgen Neuroscience and Pfizer Neuroscience that powered drug discovery programs via the deconvolution of human biology and disease genetics. He has been employing genome editing technologies and high throughout methods to enable more robust target selection and validation. As a postdoc, Sam trained with Richard Youle and Jim Inglese at the National Institutes of Health.
Networking Lunch
1:25 – 2:25pm
Novel therapies for complex neurological disorders: discovery of effective treatments
- Evaluating efficacy and potency of drug candidates on neurological conditions
- Novel and advanced therapeutic approaches in epilepsy
- Exosomes and secretome for treatment of neurodegenerative diseases
- Preclinical models and mechanisms: how well they correlate to clinical outcomes?
Director, Advanced Analytical Sciences, Noveome Biotherapeutics
Ziv Kirshner, is the Director of Advanced Analytical Sciences at Noveome Biotherapeutics, Inc. Noveome is advancing its ST266 platform biologic, a multi-targeted secretome containing many factors crucial to neuroprotection, the modulation of inflammation, cell recovery and healing. Ziv has extensive experience in the development of multiple cell and gene therapies across all stages of development and for a wide range of diseases. He was a lead scientist in Lonza Biologics and a scientist in Multi-Gene Vascular Systems Ltd. He holds a PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Pittsburgh and is dedicated to studying the mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of complex and cell-secreted biologics.
3:45 – 4:15pm
- Integrating gene-disease annotations and biological networks from multiple sources
- Predicting novel gene-disease associations from known genetic associations
- Contextualising results with public knowledge in the Euretos platform
Head of Translational Science, Euretos
Sophie has a MSc degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences and a PhD in Medicine from Leiden University – studying cancer biology in model organisms. During her postdoctoral work at the Cancer Genome Project in the Sanger Institute and the Princess Maxima Center for pediatric oncology she has worked on understanding cancer biology from cancer genomics data. Within Euretos she heads up the translational science team – translating research questions from customers into data science solutions and/or user-friendly workflows in the Euretos AI Platform.
4:20 – 5:20pm
Use of tech in the pursuit of novel therapies
- Explore the use of technology that may help facilitate the
discovery and development of novel therapies - Understand how drug-tech combinations can target residual symptoms
and disability in CNS disease - Understand how drug-tech combinations can target the
neurobiological substrate underlying CNS disease
Chief Medical Officer, Click Therapeutics
Shaheen Lakhan, MD, PhD, FAAN, is a board-certified neurologist and
pain specialist with clinical training from Cleveland Clinic and
Massachusetts General Hospital. He is chief medical officer for Click
Therapeutics, and, with over 100 peer-reviewed papers, is a professor
of neurology and neuroscience at Western University and Virginia Tech, respectively. Previously, Dr. Lakhan has served as faculty of leading institutions (Harvard Medical School, Case Western Reserve
University), chief of pain management (Virginia Tech – Carilion Clinic), and executive/leadership positions in the life sciences (Sage Therapeutics, Zogenix, The Learning Corp, Fern Health). He was conferred the President’s Call to Service Award for Lifetime Achievement by George W. Bush. Recognized by his peers, he was inducted as Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology, the Academy’s highest designation.
