Tolerx establishes Scientific Advisory Board to advance type 1 diabetes study

Tolerx, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company developing novel therapies to treat autoimmune diseases and cancer by modulating T cell activity, announced today that it has established a Scientific Advisory Board to help advance the company's research and clinical studies in type 1 diabetes.  This Scientific Advisory Board will support the scientific advancements that underlie the company's lead drug candidate, otelixizumab, as well as guide the creation and execution of the company's future strategies for therapeutics for patients with type 1 diabetes.  The founding members of the Tolerx Scientific Advisory Board will be Mark Atkinson, PhD, Peter Gottlieb, MD, Jerry Palmer, MD, and Bart Roep, MD, PhD.  

"We at Tolerx are committed to developing a new therapeutic paradigm in type 1 diabetes, and we have made great strides thus far with our DEFEND program including two on-going Phase 3 clinical trials of otelixizumab, our lead drug candidate for type 1 diabetes," said Douglas J. Ringler, VMD, president and chief executive officer of Tolerx. "We welcome Mark, Peter, Jerry, and Bart to our efforts, and are delighted that this group of world-renowned scientific leaders will be joining Tolerx's Scientific Advisory Board to help us advance our breakthrough immunotherapeutic technology."

Mark Atkinson, PhD, is currently the American Diabetes Association Eminent Scholar for Diabetes Research at The University of Florida.  He also is the co-Director for The Diabetes Center of Excellence at that institution. The author of over 225 publications, Dr. Atkinson is now in his 26th year of investigation in to the field of type 1 diabetes.  Dr. Atkinson has been the recipient of multiple scientific and humanitarian based awards for these efforts.  Those include three from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF).  The research program of Dr. Atkinson is broad in scope, but is ultimately directed at identifying a prevention and/or a cure for type 1 (i.e., insulin dependent, juvenile) diabetes. Key to achieving this goal is an improved understanding of the interactions between environmental, immunologic, and genetic factors that underlie the inability to form immunological tolerance to the insulin secreting pancreatic beta cells.  

Peter A. Gottlieb, MD, is currently a Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine at the University of Colorado Denver. He is the center director for Type 1 Diabetes TrialNet at the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes and a member of the Immune Tolerance Network. His clinical research focuses on the design and implementation of immune intervention trials to alter or prevent the progression of type 1 diabetes mellitus in prediabetic and newly diagnosed individuals. He has also developed assays to monitor and characterize human T cell responses to islet autoantigens. Dr. Gottlieb is an investigator participating in the DEFEND program.

Jerry Palmer, MD, is Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington, Director of the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Nutrition at the Veterans Affairs Puget Sound Health Care System and Director of the Diabetes Endocrinology Research Center(DERC) at the University of Washington. Professor Palmer's extensive research focuses on the immunology of the type 1 diabetes disease process in humans. He plays a major role in several clinical trials of immunomodulatory therapy of type 1 diabetes.  In addition, his laboratory has made pioneering discoveries relating to T cells in human type 1 diabetes and in patients with Latent Autoimmune Diabetes of Adults (LADA).

Bart Roep, MD, PhD, is Professor of Medicine, Diabetology and Immunopathology, Head of the Section Autoimmune Diseases at the Leiden University Medical Center and Director of the National Diabetes Expert Center in The Netherlands. He is founder and chairman of the national platform for clinical trials in diabetes. Professor Roep has focused on the role of autoreactive T cells in diabetes assessing human cellular immune responses, autoantigen identification, islet allograft rejection and the design and immunological monitoring of immuno-intervention strategies in clinical type 1 diabetes in the Netherlands. Professor Roep holds positions on a number of prestigious scientific advisory boards/research panels including the JDRF.