Therapy Areas: AIDS & HIV
Abivax names Scientific Advisory Board chair and new member
25 June 2018 -

Abiwax (Paris:ABVX), a biotechnology company, announced on Friday the appointment of Professor Ian McGowan, MD, PhD, a current scientific advisory board (SAB) member, as chair of the SAB.

Dr McGowan is currently professor of Medicine in the division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, a position he has held for the last 11 years. He is chief medical officer at AELIX Therapeutics, a Spanish biotechnology company focused on the development of a therapeutic HIV vaccine and is also chief scientific officer of Orion Biotechnology, a Canadian biotechnology company developing CCR5 antagonists for HIV prevention, oncology, and neuroinflammation.

Previously, within the biopharmaceutical industry, Dr McGowan was a senior research physician at GlaxoSmithKline in the UK where he contributed to the development of the antiviral drugs Amprenavir and Abacavir. Before that, as director of Clinical Research at Gilead Sciences Inc in San Francisco, he lead the team that developed tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (Viread) for the treatment of HIV infection.

DrMcGowan is a former Chair of the Antiviral Drug Advisory Committee of the US Food and Drug Administration and an advisor to the US Centre for Disease Control and the World Health Organisation.

The company has also appointed Professor Juergen Rockstroh, MD as a new member to the Company's SAB. Dr Rockstroh is the current head of the HIV Outpatient Clinic at the University of Bonn in Germany. From 2007 to 2011 he was elected as the president of the German AIDS Society. Since 2009, he has been a member of the executive committee of the European AIDS Clinical Society (EACS) and since 2011 a member of the governing council of the International AIDS Society. He currently chairs the hepatitis research activities in NEAT and EuroSIDA. In 2015, Professor Rockstroh was elected chair of HIV in Europe and in 2016 as president-elect for EACS.

Both changes will be enacted at the Scientific Advisory Board's next meeting at the end of June 2018. Professor Luc Teyton, MD, PhD, Dept. of Immunology and Microbiology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, US, is the current chairman of the SAB and will continue as a regular member.

Reportedly, these changes have been made to support the transition from a discovery-focused biotechnology company to a biopharmaceutical development company.

Abivax is mobilising the body's natural immune machinery to treat patients with viral infections, autoimmune diseases and cancer. A clinical-stage company, it leverages its antiviral and immune enhancing platforms to optimise candidates to cure HIV and treat inflammatory bowel diseases, as well as liver cancer.

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