PHILADELPHIA, Nov. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- PolyMedix, Inc. announced today that it has appointed Timothy Henkel, M.D., Ph.D. as Vice President, Drug Development and Chief Medical Officer.
Dr. Henkel has developed a number of antibiotic and antifungal drugs. He comes to PolyMedix from Vicuron Pharmaceuticals, where from 2001 to 2005 he was Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer. At Vicuron he filed the NDA submissions for the antibiotic drug dalbavancin and the antifungal drug anidulafungin. Earlier this year Pfizer made an offer to acquire Vicuron for $2 billion. Previously he was Vice President of Worldwide Anti-infective Clinical Development at GlaxoSmithKline. He earned his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Dr. Henkel will be leading all of PolyMedix's clinical, regulatory, and other drug development efforts.
"PolyMedix is very fortunate to have such an outstanding and experienced executive join us to lead our drug development efforts. We hope to advance a number of infectious disease and other compounds into clinical development in coming years. We all look forward to working with Tim as he leads these development activities," commented Nick Landekic, President & CEO of PolyMedix.
PolyMedix Background
PolyMedix develops biomimetics - novel non-peptide small molecule drugs which mimic the activity of proteins, but will be inexpensive to make and formulate into drugs. To design these compounds PolyMedix uses a proprietary computational drug design technology developed at and licensed from the University of Pennsylvania. These computational methodologies are based on the inventions of Drs. William DeGrado, Michael Klein, and Gregory Tew.
The first products PolyMedix has developed with the computational technology are novel small molecule antibiotic drug candidates. To develop these compounds, PolyMedix imitated nature and mimicked the activity of host defense proteins, one of the oldest and most effective antimicrobial defense systems in virtually all living creatures. Unlike conventional antibiotic drugs, PolyMedix's antimicrobial compounds work by a novel mechanism which directly lyses bacterial cell membranes. They thus have the potential to be rapid acting, broad-spectrum antibiotic drugs for which bacterial resistance is very unlikely to occur. PolyMedix plans to file an IND and start human clinical trials with its first antibiotic drug in 2006.
PolyMedix is also developing polymer derivatives of these antibiotic compounds. These polymers may be used as additives to paints, plastics, and textiles to create self-sterilizing antimicrobial products and surfaces.
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and that could cause the Company's actual results and experience to differ materially from anticipated results and expectations expressed in these forward-looking statements. Among other things, there can be no assurance that the Company's compounds will successfully complete clinical testing or be granted regulatory approval to be sold and marketed in the United States or elsewhere.
PolyMedix, Inc.CONTACT: Company: Nicholas Landekic of PolyMedix, Inc., +1-215-966-6199,nlandekic@polymedix.com; Investor: Anita Monteith of Montridge LLC,+1-203-894-8038, amonteith@montridgellc.com, for PolyMedix
Web site: http://www.polymedix.com/
