Lord David Prior Appointed as Chair of e-therapeutics’ Board of Directors – Biotech Investments

23rd May 2024

JPJ:ETX

ISIN: GB00B2823H99

e-therapeutics plc  

(“e-therapeutics” or “ETX” or the “Company”) 

Lord David Prior Appointed as Chair of e-therapeutics’ Board of Directors

London, UK, 23 May 2024 – e-therapeutics plc, a company integrating computational power and biological data to discover life-transforming RNAi medicines, is pleased announce the appointment of Lord David Prior to its Board of Directors. Lord Prior will assume the role of Chair of the Board with immediate effect. Professor Trevor Jones will step down as Chair and will remain a non-executive director of the Company. 

Lord Prior brings extensive healthcare experience to e-therapeutics’ Board. He served as Chair of Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust from 2002 to 2012, before becoming Chair of the Care Quality Commission. In 2015, he was appointed Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Health and created a Life Peer. In December 2016, he was appointed as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, with specific responsibility for developing industrial strategy. Lord Prior stepped down from this role in October 2017 to become Chair of University College London Hospitals and subsequently became Chair of NHS England, a Director of Genomics England and a member of the UK Life Sciences Council to March 2022. 

He was educated at Cambridge University and subsequently qualified as a barrister. He trained in finance at Lehman Brothers and Lazard Freres in New York before holding a number of senior positions within the industrial sector, including British Steel, where he was Commercial Director.   He was elected MP for North Norfolk in 1997 and became CEO and Deputy Chair of the Conservative Party.  

Lord Prior is currently Deputy Chairman UK and Global Senior Advisor at Lazard. He is also Chair of Protas, a not-for-profit clinical trials business, Chair of the Cambridge Life Sciences Council, Chair of Science Capital Imperial, a venture fund aligned with Imperial College, and a member of the Novo Nordisk Sustainability Advisory Council.      

 Ali Mortazavi, Chief Executive Officer of e-therapeutics, commented:

“It is with great pleasure that I welcome David to the Board. David’s vast healthcare experience will be extremely valuable as we progress our GalOmic™ programs and grow the business, and I look forward to working with him as we realise our vision of computing the future of medicine. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Trevor on behalf of the Board and the wider e-therapeutics team for his hard work and dedication as Chair.“

Lord David Prior, Chair of e-therapeutics, commented:

“I am pleased to join e-therapeutics as Chair of the Board at such a pivotal and exciting moment. The Company is currently advancing its novel GalOmic™ therapies towards the clinic and is at the forefront of the AI drug discovery revolution. I look forward to working with the rest of the Board and the management team to continue the impressive progress towards developing better treatments for patients faster.”

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About e-therapeutics plc 

e-therapeutics plc (“ETX”) uniquely combines computation and RNAi to discover and develop life-transforming medicines. ETX’s proprietary RNAi chemistry platform, GalOmic™, enables generation of specific, potent, and durable siRNA therapeutics for effective silencing of novel gene targets in hepatocytes. The cutting-edge HepNet™ computational platform allows ETX to discover better medicines faster through generation of novel insights and increased automation across all stages of drug development. HepNet™ encompasses an extensive hepatocyte-specific knowledgebase and a suite of advanced AI-driven approaches which enable identification of novel gene targets, rapid target-indication assessment, and predictive in silico siRNA design. The Company has specialist expertise and a robust position in applying computation to biology. Its computational approaches have been extensively validated through generation of data from pipeline programs and successful drug discovery collaborations with biopharma companies, such as Novo Nordisk, Galapagos NV, and iTeos Therapeutics.

Leveraging the combined capabilities of HepNet™ and GalOmic™, ETX is progressing a therapeutic pipeline of highly differentiated RNAi candidates across a variety of therapeutic areas with high unmet need. The Company has generated positive proof-of-concept data on preclinical assets in metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH), dry age-related macular degeneration (dry AMD), haemophilia, and cardiometabolic disease, further validating its computationally enhanced approach to research and development. ETX is currently progressing its GalOmic therapies towards the clinic with its most developed assets, ETX-312 for MASH and ETX-407 for dry AMD, at the IND-enabling stage.