Corteria Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company developing innovative treatments for certain forms of heart failure, announced today the recruitment of Dr. Francesca C. Lawson as Chief Medical Officer. Corteria Pharmaceuticals also expanded its Board of Directors with the addition of Dr. Marc Semigran as an independent Director, as well as its Scientific Advisory Board with the addition of Dr. Jeffrey Testani.
"We are highly pleased to welcome Drs. Lawson, Semigran and Testani to our team to accelerate the development of our programs. Their expertise and in-depth knowledge of these diseases will be invaluable to Corteria," commented Philip Janiak, founder and CEO of Corteria Pharmaceuticals.
Francesca C. Lawson, M.D., based in Philadelphia, USA, is a specialist in cardiometabolic diseases with more than 30 years of experience in drug development, from Phase 1 to Phase 3. Dr. Lawson joins Corteria Pharmaceuticals from Applied Therapeutics, where she spent three years overseeing the development of new drug candidates for the treatment of diabetic cardiomyopathy as Vice President, Clinical and Regulatory Strategy. Prior to Applied Therapeutics, she led the clinical trials of cardiometabolic drug candidates at Sanofi where she successfully developed sotaglifozin in worsening heart failure.
Marc Semigran, M.D., a cardiologist with subspecialty in heart failure based in Cambridge, USA, joins the Board of Directors of Corteria Pharmaceuticals as an independent Director. Dr. Semigran currently serves as Chief Medical Officer at Renovacor, and previously as Head of Clinical Development of MyoKardia, a biopharmaceutical company pioneering new approaches for the treatment of cardiomyopathies. There, he led the development of mavacamten in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Dr. Semigran is the author of numerous scientific peer-reviewed publications, for which he has received several prestigious awards. While Medical Director of the Heart Failure and Cardiac Transplant Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, he served as principal investigator in major clinical trials.
Jeffrey Testani, M.D., a cardiologist, associate professor of Medicine and Director of Heart Failure Research at Yale University, USA, is an expert on heart failure and cardiac transplantation. Dr. Testani also runs a large research program focusing on cardio-renal syndrome at the Yale Heart and Vascular Center and has published several seminal papers in peer-reviewed journals.
About Corteria Pharmaceuticals:
Founded in 2021 and based in Paris, France, Corteria Pharmaceuticals is a biotechnology company specialized in the development of first-in-class drugs for the treatment of heart failure subpopulations. Despite advances in the management of this serious disease, the prevalence of heart failure continues to rise, with over 60 million cases worldwide. Corteria Pharmaceuticals' innovative approach is based on a selection of therapeutic targets involved in the worsening of heart failure and in the acute form of the disease in humans, as well as a stratification strategy to identify patients likely to respond best to its treatments.
More information is available on the company's website: www.corteriapharma.com