6 January 2021 - - US-based gene therapy company SwanBio Therapeutics has appointed Scott McMillan, Ph.D. as chief technical officer, the company said.

Dr. McMillan is a life sciences executive with more than 25 years of experience in quality, process development, scale-up and technology transfer from research to commercial scale.

He joins SwanBio from Saliogen Therapeutics, a start-up next-generation gene therapy company, where he served as president and chief executive officer.

Before that, he served as chief operating officer of uniQure, Inc., where he was responsible for all GMP relevant activities including, manufacturing, quality assurance, quality control, supply chain, technical services and facility management.

Prior to that, Dr. McMillan held technical operations and manufacturing roles of increasing responsibility at AMAG Pharmaceuticals, AVANT Immunotherapeutics Inc, Johnson Matthey Pharmaceutical Materials Inc., Artisan Industries Inc., LIST Inc. and Herzog Hart Corp. Dr. McMillan began his career in academia, serving as an assistant professor of chemical engineering at Northeastern University.

He currently serves as a business mentor and on the Industrial advisory board within the Department of Chemical Engineering at Northeastern.

Dr. McMillan holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and an M.S. in economics and a B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Delaware.

SwanBio Therapeutics is a gene therapy company that aims to bring life-changing treatments to people with devastating, genetically defined neurological conditions.

SwanBio is advancing a pipeline of AAV-based gene therapies, designed to be delivered intrathecally, that can address targets within both the central and peripheral nervous systems.

This approach has the potential to be applied broadly across three disease classifications spastic paraplegias, monogenic neuropathies and polygenic neuropathies. SwanBio's lead program is being advanced toward clinical development for the treatment of adrenomyeloneuropathy.