Eloxx Pharmaceuticals tapped Celgene veteran Neil Belloff as the company’s general counsel and corporate secretary.
Eloxx Pharmaceuticals tapped Celgene veteran Neil Belloff as the company’s general counsel and corporate secretary.
An attorney, Belloff served as senior corporate counsel at Celgene for the past seven years. Belloff has more than 30 years of legal and business experience. Throughout the course of his career, Belloff has held significant management and project development responsibilities, including risk assessment, strategic planning, regulatory compliance, mergers and acquisitions, capital formation, privacy, pharmaceutical development, and securities matters. Belloff is also a corporate governance and compliance expert, Waltham, Mass.-based Eloxx said. Prior to joining Eloxx and Celgene, Belloff served as head of U.S. Corporate and Securities Counsel at Deutsche Telecom. He also served as senior attorney-advisor in the Division of Corporation Finance at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C.
Belloff said he was looking forward to being part of the Eloxx team and helping the company grow.
Robert E. Ward, chairman and chief executive officer of Eloxx, touted the hiring of Belloff.
“I believe that Neil’s experiences advising public companies through the full development life-cycle and his knowledge of the global biopharmaceutical industry, as well as his expertise in corporate governance and compliance, will add significant value to the company as it matures,” Ward said in a statement.
Belloff was added to the company roster a year after Eloxx was acquired by Israel-based Sevion Therapeutics, Inc. Following the completion of the acquisition, Sevion then assumed the name Eloxx.
Last week Eloxx presented positive new data for it lead investigational product candidate, ELX-02, is a small molecule drug candidate designed to restore production of full-length functional proteins. At the 41st European Cystic Fibrosis Conference, the company said ELX-02 “restores transmembrane conductance in and promotes forskolin-induced swelling (FIS) of cystic fibrosis patient organoids carrying homozygous and compound heterozygous CFTR nonsense mutations.” The company plans to initiate a Phase II study in cystic fibrosis patients carrying at least one G42X mutation later this year.
“Approximately 13 percent of patients with Cystic Fibrosis carry a nonsense mutation on at least one allele in their CFTR, have a high burden of disease, and few, if any, treatment options are available. The use of patient organoids from the HUB is rapidly being adopted as a potential surrogate marker likely to predict potential clinical benefit in cystic fibrosis patients by industry, payers, and regulators. This personalized medicine approach has the potential to accelerate the development of appropriate therapies to treat cystic fibrosis patients,” Pedro Huertas, chief medical officer of Eloxx Pharmaceuticals said in a statement.
