Intezyne Taps Veteran Banker E. Russell McAllister as President and CEO
TAMPA, Fla., March 15, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Intezyne, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company headquartered at the USF Tampa Bay Technology Incubator, announced that the company's Chief Financial Officer, E. Russell McAllister, has been selected as its next President and Chief Executive Officer.
"Since we recruited Russell to join Intezyne as Chief Financial Officer in late 2016, he has had a profoundly positive impact on Intezyne's development and corporate strategy," said Glenn Walthall, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Investment Officer of Gaston Capital. "Russell's 20 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry, including senior roles in equity research and healthcare investment banking, and the resulting breadth and depth of his experience, made him the ideal candidate to become Intezyne's next CEO. The Board has great confidence in his ability to successfully lead the company through the next phase of its evolution."
"We enthusiastically hired Russell to help Intezyne optimally leverage its novel technologies, and that strategy is already paying off," added Hooshmand Sheshbaradaran, PhD, Director. "Intezyne's development strategy continues to rapidly evolve as new and compelling mechanism-of-action data emerges, including recent and intriguing data showing immunomodulatory activity of IT-139 in combination with checkpoint inhibitors."
Intezyne currently has two clinical-stage programs: IT-139, a novel Cancer Resistance Pathway (CRP) inhibitor for the treatment of pancreatic, gastric and other cancers in combination with existing anti-cancer therapies, and IT-141, a novel topoisomerase I (TOP-I) inhibitor for the treatment of colorectal, gastric and other cancers. IT-139 successfully completed a Phase 1 monotherapy study and was granted an Orphan Drug Designation (ODD) in pancreatic cancer. Intezyne is currently manufacturing IT-139 and expects to initiate one or more combination Phase 1/2 studies by early 2019. Concurrently, Intezyne continues to enroll patients in a Phase 1 dose-escalation study of IT-141.
"It's an honor to have been selected by the Board to lead Intezyne," said E. Russell McAllister. "After spending much of my career vetting technologies, I view Intezyne's product candidates as among the most compelling, with the potential to significantly improve outcomes for advanced cancer patients in a number of different indications. After building a strong organizational foundation in 2017, I expect 2018 to be a transformative year for Intezyne as we actively evaluate a variety of strategic options, including a pre-IPO Series B round and potential collaborations and licensing transactions with established biopharmaceutical and diagnostics companies worldwide, that would bring these promising product candidates closer to patients and physicians."