Industry leader brings 30 years of senior pharmaceutical, investment and clinical neurology expertise to help shape CNS portfolio strategy
Boston, MA – September 8, 2021 – Cerevance, a private clinical-stage drug discovery and development company focused on brain diseases, today announced the appointment of Mike Poole, M.D., FACP, to Cerevance’s Board of Directors. Dr. Poole currently is Senior Advisor at RBNC Therapeutics, a venture-funded company working on precision therapeutics for neuropsychiatric disorders, and also serves as an advisor for the Alzheimer’s Disease Diagnostic Initiative for Gates Ventures. He recently served as senior advisor and head of the COVID-19 therapeutics accelerator at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and previously led external investments in the Global Health Office of the President.
Earlier in his career, Dr. Poole served as Vice President and Head of Neuroscience Innovation at AstraZeneca, and Vice President of Neuroscience Development at Wyeth and Pfizer. He was also a venture partner at Biomatics Capital and at Arch Ventures, focusing on big data and genomics-enabled advances in neuroscience. Dr. Poole earned his medical degree from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine.
“We are delighted to welcome Mike to Cerevance’s Board and look forward to benefitting from his deep expertise in developing new treatments for brain diseases,” said Brad Margus, chief executive officer of Cerevance. “His CNS drug development experiences at both large and small organizations will be invaluable as we advance our pipeline of potentially transformative medicines.”
Dr. Poole stated, “I am delighted to be joining Cerevance’s Board as the company’s NETSseq platform continues to generate rich transcriptional and epigenetic data sets to reveal novel, highly selective targets. I am eager to work with the Cerevance team to advance a number of new programs in areas of critical unmet need.”
About Cerevance
Cerevance, a private, clinical-stage pharmaceutical company focused on brain diseases, is applying a new technology, called NETSseq, to reveal transcriptional and epigenetic differences between specific cell types in human brains spanning nine decades in age. NETSseq profiles neuronal and glial cell populations at depths not possible with other approaches, generating unprecedented data sets and insights. The company has thus far partnered with 20 brain banks around the world to assemble a growing collection of more than 8,000 clinically annotated, human brain tissue samples from healthy and diseased donors. By applying NETSseq to specific cell types critical to circuits disrupted by disease and comparing vulnerable and resilient cell populations, Cerevance’s scientists have begun identifying targets and advancing a pipeline of novel therapeutics that modulate them for CNS diseases.
Contacts
Cerevance:
Robert Middlebrook, +1-408-220-5722
Media
Andrew Mielach, amielach@lifescicomms.com, +1- 646-876-5868