Purespring Therapeutics, a pioneering gene therapy company focused on transforming the treatment of kidney diseases, is expanding the Company’s medical and operational capabilities with four senior appointments.
Purespring Therapeutics Expands Senior Team with Key Appointments
Appointments includeDr Pille Harrison as VP of Clinical Development, Dr Aoife Waters as Medical Director, Nick Cetateanu as Head of Operations and Andreea Iuras as Programme Manager
London—26July 2022— Purespring Therapeutics, a pioneering gene therapy company focused on transforming the treatment of kidney diseases, is expanding the Company’s medical and operational capabilities with four senior appointments. Dr Pille Harrison joins as Vice President of Clinical Development, Dr Aoife Waters as Medical Director, Nick Cetateanu as Head of Operations and Andreea Iuras as Programme Manager.
These appointments bring decades of expertise in both gene therapy and kidney disease, which will be critical to Purespring’s goal to advance its proprietary gene therapy platform to revolutionise the treatment of chronic kidney diseases.
Dr Pille Harrison is a rheumatologist with extensive experience in early and mid-stage clinical trials at small biotech. Pille joins from Alpine Immune Sciences Inc, where she was the VP of Clinical Development. Before this position she worked at Argenx and Cyxone. Pille also consulted in rheumatology at the Taunton & Somerset NHS Foundation Trust and holds a D.Phil from the University of Oxford in genetic susceptibility and severity factors in rheumatoid arthritis.
Dr Aoife Waters is a specialist in children’s kidney disease with over two decades’ experience in tertiary paediatric centres in Ireland, the UK and Canada and 15 years’ experience in nephrology. Her areas of focus include clinical and molecular aspects of glomerular disorders involving complement-mediated renal disease, haemolytic uraemic syndromes and childhood nephrotic syndromes. Academic partnerships include the Kidney Development and Disease group at UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and Bristol Glomerular Disease Group.
Nick Cetateanu has held a variety of senior roles across cell and gene therapy including in operations, CMC, research and development, commercial launch readiness and strategy. Most recently, Nick was Senior Director at Orchard Therapeutics, before which he worked at global pharmaceutical companies BTG and Novartis.
Andreea Iuras joins from Orchard Therapeutics where she was Senior Project Manager. Prior to this, she held senior roles at gene therapy start-up Autolus as well as GSK and AstraZeneca. Her background spans program leadership, scientific research, the formulary process and product planning to drive forward multi-pipeline biopharmaceutical programs.
Richard Francis, Chief Executive Officer of Purespring, commented:“It’s great to be able to hire people who are so well qualified to support us in our goal of developing renal gene therapy, addressing the gap in innovation that exists in the treatments for kidney diseases for which there are limited options. These new members of the team play an important roleas we build out our capabilities and we look forward to working with them.”
In addition, Purespring has appointed Dimple Raval as Finance Business Partner, Kushal Paudel as Senior Scientist and Umar Ishaque as Associate Scientist, critical supporting roles that augment those senior hires.
ENDS
For further information, contact:
Purespring:
Richard Francis, CEO
contact@purespringtx.com
+44 (0)20 3855 6324
LinkedIn
Consilium Strategic Communications:
Amber Fennell, Jessica Hodgson, Genevieve Wilson
purespring@consilium-comms.com
Notes to Editors
About Purespring
Purespring is the first company to treat kidney diseases by directly targeting the podocyte, a specialised kidney cell implicated in many kidney diseases, through AAV gene therapy.
Headed by former Sandoz CEO, Richard Francis, Purespring was founded on the work of Professor Moin Saleem, Professor of Paediatric Renal Medicine at the University of Bristol, where he heads a world leading group researching glomerular diseases. Purespring seeks to advance gene therapies for the treatment of both monogenic and non-monogenic chronic renal diseases that are currently poorly addressed with existing treatments.
The company also has a proprietary in-vivo pipeline engine, FunSel, which is a library of all biological factors that could be candidates for gene therapy, combined with a screening method to evaluate these factors in disease models. FunSel allows Purespring to discover new gene therapy candidates across all indications, unconstrained by genetics, to find the right candidate to make the best therapy.
An initial £45 million commitment to Purespring from Syncona Ltd is enabling Purespring to progress its assets to the clinic. Syncona’s Chief Investment Officer, Chris Hollowood, serves as Chairman. For more information please visit: purespringtx.com and follow us on LinkedIn.
