8 January 2018 - - Watertown, Massachusetts-based clinical stage biopharmaceutical company Tarveda Therapeutics, Inc. has appointed Brian Roberts as chief financial officer, the company said.
Roberts has nearly 25 years of finance, capital markets, and operations experience spanning the life sciences, medtech and media industries with a proven track record of delivering positive results, financing companies and driving shareholder value.
Prior to joining Tarveda, Roberts served as chief financial and operating officer at Avedro, Inc., a privately held biotechnology and medical device company.
During his tenure, he acted as interim chief executive officer, leading the company through FDA approval, manufacturing readiness and commercial launch of its lead combination drug, Photrexa, and its device, the KXL System.
Previously, he served as chief financial officer at Insulet Corp., a leader in tubeless insulin pump technology. During his tenure, Insulet grew rapidly from approximately USD 30m to nearly USD 300m in revenue, increased its market capitalisation to over USD 2bn and achieved operating profitability.
Tarveda discovers and develops pentarins, a new class of potent and selective miniature drug conjugates with enhanced targeting capabilities and pharmacokinetics for the treatment of patients with a wide range of solid tumor cancers.
The company's strategy includes developing its own proprietary pentarins as well as applying the pentarin platform to enhance the effectiveness of novel payloads of pharmaceutical collaborators.
The company's lead pentarin clinical drug candidate, PEN-221, targets the somatostatin receptor 2 (SSTR2) for treatment of patients with tumors that express SSTR2 including neuroendocrine, small cell lung, and other cancers.
Tarveda is also advancing its HSP90 drug conjugate platform with lead drug candidate PEN-866, which is a miniature drug conjugate that selectively binds to the intracellular target, heat shock protein 90 (HSP90), and is linked to the payload SN-38.