Session: Navigating from discovery to preclinical candidate and beyond

By Pharmaron, TTxD & Aglaia Oncology Funds

Joost Kreijtz | CDO | Trained Therapeutix Discovery

Joost Kreijtz is a biomedical scientist, drug developer and entrepreneur. With more than 15 years experience in drug development, he is specialized in the development trajectory of immunotherapies from concept to clinical translation. He currently serves as Chief Development Officer for Trained Therapeutix Discovery where he oversees the development programs and manages the R&D site in the Netherlands.

Joost also is a co-founder of Bio-TRIP, a biotech entrepreneurial engine, and is owner of DYZ consultancy, consulting on early drug development to biotech start-ups and scale-ups.

Prior to these roles he was Chief of Staff at Aduro Biotech Europe, working with project teams in the Netherlands and US to drive Aduro’s therapeutic antibody programs forward. During his time at Aduro, Joost was responsible for three preclinical development programs that are still active in clinical development (through Sairopa and Novartis).

Joost started his career at the Viroscience Lab at the Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, the Netherlands where he completed a PhD in immunovirology and brought a viral vector-based vaccine against highly pathogenic avian influenza from bench to bedside in the form of a Phase I/IIa clinical trial.

About Trained Therapeutix Discovery

TTxD develops nanobiologics, a new therapeutic modality consisting of apoA1, (phospho-)lipids, cholesterol, and lipophilic drugs¹. Besides tropism for innate immune cells, apoA1 provides structural stability and makes nanobiologics highly biocompatible. Using innovative drug conjugate and (pro-)drug strategies⁵, nanobiologics can be straightforwardly functionalized to create effective nanomedicines for therapeutically targeting the innate immune system.⁵ Applying this proprietary method, TTxD has stably loaded nanobiologics with more than 50 pro-drugs of over 10 different small molecule drugs, without notably affecting nanobiologics’ size or in vivo behavior. TTxD has established scalable and GMP-ready manufacturing for its nanobiologics designed to induce trained immunity for cancer immunotherapy or to inhibit innate immune activation in auto-inflammatory, infectious and cardiovascular diseases, and organ transplant rejection. Building the regulatory dossier around its RIDE-001 Immuno-oncology program, TTxD has acquired safety and immunological data in rats and non-human primates. RIDE-001 is part of a diverse drug development pipeline designed to treat immune-mediated diseases including cancer.