What Happened?
Milpitas, CA-based Protagonist-Therapeutics Appointed Dinesh Patel as Cheif Executive Officer
About the Company
Protagonist Therapeutics is a biotechnology company pursuing the discovery and development of target oral peptides as well differentiated alternatives to antibodies, and also as new chemical entities (NCEs) against those targets and life threatening diseases for which suitable small molecule and/or biologic options are not available. Peptides typically suffer from limitations of poor proteolytic stability and therefore find scarce therapeutic utility that is largely limited to ‘injectable drugs’. Protagonist’s technology platform is aimed at overcoming these restrictions and expanding the scope of peptide therapeutics to address unmet needs. Specific emphasis is placed on identifying ‘orally stable’ scaffolds and/or engineering oral stability characteristics onto them. The platform has been optimized over the years and involves synergistic integration of rational drug design, diversity oriented computational tools, phage display libraries, recombinant peptide expression, ex vivo oral stability methods, and peptide/medicinal chemistry techniques. This activity has led to the identification of ‘privileged scaffolds’ with favorable oral stability characteristics. Furthermore, the technology platform is well suited both for de novo discovery against a target and optimization around a given chemical starting point.
About the Person
Dinesh Patel has 30 years of executive, entrepreneurial, and scientific experience spanning big pharma, biotech, and the biopharmaceutical industry. He was previously (2006-08) the President & CEO OF Arête Therapeutics, a privately held company with $51 million in VC funding and a focus on first-in-class drugs for metabolic syndrome. He was the President, CEO & Co-founder (2003-05) of Miikana Therapeutics, an oncology based company that was acquired by Entremed in 2005. One of Miikana`s asset (ENMD2076) has progressed into phase 2 POC trials for ovarian and hematological cancers in 2010 and continues to generate multiple milestone payments for its shareholders.
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