CARB-X announces appointment of Dan Burgess as board chair

2023-03-15

高管变更

CARB-X’s governing body, the Joint Oversight Board (JOB), voted to appoint Dan Burgess, as the first independent chair of the JOB. The JOB oversees the strategy, scope and budget of CARB-X. The new role of independent chair further strengthens CARB-X governance and brings an industry voice and perspective to the international partnership. Burgess is currently chairman and CEO of Pulmocide Pulmocide, a late clinical-stage anti-fungal company and was previously CEO of two antibiotic companies (Rempex Pharmaceuticals and Mpex Pharmaceuticals). He is also a venture partner at SV Health Investors and a director of several public and private biotech companies, including the anti-infective companies Cidara Therapeutics, Nabriva Therapeutics, Arbutus and Qpex Biopharma. In these roles, he has been directly involved in developing new drugs from early-stage discovery through to commercialisation. "In providing CARB-X oversight, Dan will be drawing on his significant experience as an antimicrobial developer in the pharmaceutical industry and understanding of the challenges of the antibiotic market,” said Christopher Houchens, PhD, director, division of CBRN Medical Countermeasures at Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). “We look forward to working with him in moving promising products forward in the development pipeline to combat the growing threat of antimicrobial-resistant infections." "I’m honored to join the CARB-X Joint Oversight Board at a time when antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is spreading across the globe and our tools to fight these infections are becoming obsolete," said Dan Burgess, MBA. "AMR is already responsible for more than 1 million deaths per year. Its continued growth threatens to reverse many of the gains we have made across the healthcare landscape over the last 50 years in areas such as oncology, autoimmune disease, and surgery, where the ability to successfully control infections in patients with weakened immune systems is now at risk. This is a tremendous opportunity for me to work with academic, government, and industry experts to address AMR through CARB-X’s unique model of supporting innovation. "I am also excited to partner with Kevin Outterson, JD, LLM, executive director of CARB-X, a world leader in developing new incentive programmes in the anti-infective space, as well as the chief of R&D, Erin Duffy, PhD, an expert and leader in drug discovery who understands the difficulties facing antibacterial drug developers. Together with the rest of the CARB-X team, I hope we can build on the impressive progress in advancing important new treatments, vaccines, and diagnostics while also helping to create an improved economic environment that provides both an attractive commercial opportunity for these new products and ensures that appropriate models of stewardship are followed, so that these products will remain useful for many years to come." The JOB comprises representatives from the organisations that fund CARB-X, including BARDA within the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), Wellcome, the UK Department of Health & Social Care’s Global AMR Innovation Fund (GAMRIF), the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and NIAID. All members of the JOB complete a robust conflict-of-interest process and are excluded from participating in any funding decision in which they may have a conflict. The independent chair will have no role in selecting companies for the CARB-X portfolio. “Dan is a highly accomplished biotech executive with significant board-level experience. He has extensive first-hand knowledge of the opportunities and challenges that our portfolio companies will be facing as they graduate from the CARB-X programme, and involvement from the investor side in assessing later-stage anti-infective opportunities. This gives him a unique perspective which can be useful to the board as well as to our portfolio companies as they move forward,” said Timothy Jinks, head, infectious disease interventions, Wellcome. Since 2016, CARB-X has supported 92 product developers in 12 countries. CARB-X product developers have made tremendous progress developing vaccines, rapid diagnostics, antibiotics, and other prevention products and non-traditional treatments to address the global health crisis of antimicrobial resistance. 12 of these have begun or completed first-in-human studies, and two rapid diagnostics are now available in Europe. “This is an exciting time for CARB-X. We recently launched new funding rounds, and with the recommitment from our funders to advance CARB-X over the next decade, Dan will help us leverage and broaden our partnerships to strengthen the global pipeline of life-saving products,” said Kevin Outterson, executive director of CARB-X and Austin B. Fletcher professor of law at Boston University. CARB-X was founded at Boston University in 2016.