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El Dr. Khalid Islam té una llarga experiència al capdavant d'empreses biotecnològiques.
 10.02.2016

Khalid Islam appointed Chairman of the Board of Directors of Minoryx

Minoryx Therapeutics, a drug development company specialized in the discovery of new treatments for orphan diseases, has appointed Khalid Islam as Chairman of their Board of Directors. Since February 2016, Minoryx has expanded to include research laboratory premises at the Barcelona Science Park (PCB).

 

Dr. Islam has 27-years experience in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry. From 2009 to 2014, he was chairman and CEO at Gentium SpA, a company listed on the Nasdaq, and succeeded in turning financial deficit to profitability, with products such as the drug Defitelio. Under his leadership, Gentium merged with Jazz Pharmaceuticals, in a transaction valued at 1,000 million dollars.

At present, Khalid Islam is chairman and member of the Executive Board of several pharmaceutical companies and continues to report his research findings in major publications of the industry.

Minoryx´s next step is to bring their main candidate, MIN-102, to clinical stage testing. This drug is aimed at adrenoleukodystrophy, a disease linked to abnormalities in chromosome X (X-ALD), which affects the central nervous system, and, for which there is no treatment available currently. MIN-102 has already shown excellent efficacy in vivo  testing.

Minoryx is also expected to complete validation of SEE-Tx, a drug discovery platform which incorporates a patented technology that identifies a new generation of pharmacological chaperones.

This appointment comes after a funding round of 19.4 million Euros, which was closed last October. Dr. Khalid Islam takes over Nigel Ten Fleming, who has made “an outstanding contribution to the development of Minoryx in the past few years” as pointed out by Marc Martinell, CEO of the biotech.

Since its creation, Minoryx has been able to move more than 24 million Euros, including the aforementioned funding round last October, which was headed by Ysios Capital Partners, with the participation of Caixa Capital Risc, Roche Venture Fund, Kurma Partners , Chiesi Ventures,  Healthequity and Idinvest.

Minoryx, headed by Dr. Marc Martinell, Joan Aymamí and Xavier Barril, is based at the TecnoCampus Mataró-Maresme, but since this past February it has brought its research laboratory to new laboratory premises at PCB.