Esperion Therapeutics is bringing on some familiar faces to its staff, including a new CEO that has an extensive history with the pharmaceutical firm.
Tim Mayleben replaces
Esperion Therapeutics' founder, Roger Newton, as president and CEO while Newton becomes the firm's executive chairman and chief scientific officer. Mayleben previously served as president and CEO of Ann Arbor-based Aastrom Biosciences before stepping down last summer.
Mayleben also once served as
Esperion Therapeutics' COO and CFO a decade ago, helping it raise more than $200 million in seed capital and negotiating its sale to Pfizer in 2004 for $1.3 billion. Newton bought back the company four years ago and relaunched it.
"I am a business person by training. Roger is a scientist and a company builder," Mayleben says. "We complement each other really well."
Esperion Therapeutic's most advanced product candidate, ETC-1002, is in Phase 2 clinical trials for patients with hypercholesterolemia and other cardiometabolic risk factors. ETC-1002 is a small-molecule metabolic regulator of imbalances in lipid and carbohydrate metabolism and inflammation. It is being developed to address the underlying causes of metabolic diseases and reduce multiple risk factors associated with them. In preclinical and clinical studies to date, treatment with ETC-1002 has been shown to be safe and well-tolerated while producing statin-like reductions in LDL-C and inflammatory markers.
Esperion Therapeutics plans to wrap up it's Phase 2 clinical trials later this year and begin Phase 2 D clinical trials in 2014. Phase 2 D clinical trials are one of the final steps before FDA approval and often take two years or more to complete. The company has historically called Ann Arbor home before moving to the Michigal Life Sciences Innovation Center, managed by Ann Arbor SPARK, in Plymouth. The company now employs 11 people after hiring three recently.
Source: Tim Mayleben, president & CEO of Esperion Therapeutics and Roger Newton, founder of Esperion Therapeutics
Writer: Jon Zemke
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