AKL Research and Development, a company developing an investigational osteoarthritis (OA) medicine, announced yesterday that it has named Dr Annalisa Jenkins and Lord Michael Grade as its advisors.

Dr Jenkins is former head of Global Research & Development and executive vice president Global Development & Medical at Merck Serono. Lord Grade is former chairman of the BBC.

The new appointments come as AKL enters its next phase of bringing its investigational medicine, APPA, to market. Currently in Phase I clinical trials at Liverpool University, APPA is an NFkB and Nrf2 modulator that harnesses the power of two secondary metabolites of plant origin in a fully synthetic oral therapy and is a potential novel treatment for osteoarthritis (OA).