Bioasis Technologies appoints Day president, CEO

2017-04-24 17:27 ET - News Release

Mr. Rob Hutchison reports

BIOASIS APPOINTS MARK DAY, PH.D., AS CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER AND DIRECTOR

Bioasis Technologies Inc. has appointed Dr. Mark Day, PhD, as president and chief executive officer of the company, effective immediately. Dr. Day succeeds Rob Hutchison, who will become executive chairman of the board of directors of the company. Dr. Day will also serve on the Bioasis board of directors.

Dr. Day most recently served as head, CNS Virtual Discovery, at Purdue Pharma. Prior to joining Purdue, Dr. Day served as executive director, head of external research and scouting, at Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Dr. Day also serves as adjunct associate professor (neuroscience) at Yale University.

Dr. Day is widely recognized for his expertise and success in the recognition, evaluation and development of pipeline acquisition and collaboration targets across several therapeutic areas, including neurotherapeutics and rare diseases. In pursuit of business development opportunities, Dr. Day has evaluated over 300 programs, resulting in a uniquely broad knowledge of the pharmaceutical industry and its opportunities. In the process, he has developed business and personal relationships with many of the industry's leading executives.

Demonstrating corporate leadership, Dr. Day has developed business plans for Alexion, Purdue, Wyeth and Bristol-Myers Squibb in multiple functional areas ranging from the development of external research discovery engines and global scouting strategies to the creation of internal venture/investment funds. To facilitate the rapid evaluation of pipeline acquisition and collaboration opportunities, and to lower the costs in time and financing of evaluative processes, Dr. Day has developed strategies that can shorten evaluation periods by several months, leading to early decisions regarding the advancement or early termination of the evaluative processes. Dr. Day has presented his evaluations and formal recommendations at the highest corporate levels. He has also participated in the resulting deal negotiations, leading to several high-profile acquisitions and collaborations.

Dr. Day holds a PhD, neuroscience, from Cardiff University in Wales. He completed postdoctoral work in systems-level neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh where he investigated the effects of glutamate-receptor subtypes on encoding, memory consolidation and retrieval of paired-associate learning (PAL). Over his academic and industry career, Dr. Day has published over 60 peer-reviewed scientific papers in world-leading journals (such as Nature, Science, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Nature Neuroscience). He has managed research teams and has created and chaired a governance team for the management of a $30-million research and development budget. He has also established and managed R&D alliances and collaborations with contract research organizations, academic laboratories and foundations in the United States, European Union, Australia, and Asia.

Mr. Hutchison, chairman of the board of directors, stated: "The board of directors and I are very pleased to welcome Dr. Mark Day to Bioasis. Mark has established himself as a leader in the pharmaceutical industry, both as a business development executive and as a neuroscientist. He has a proven ability to discover and evaluate neurotherapeutic pipeline opportunities on both scientific and business levels, to present compelling proposals to potential partners, to manage teams and to negotiate deals. I want to personally welcome Mark and I'm looking forward to working with him."

Dr. Day commented: "I consider the Bioasis Transcend platform to be one of the most unique and promising blood-brain barrier technologies of our time. Ensuring that experimental medicines are able to reach their targets in the brain has been shown to improve their probability of success. The development of neurotherapeutics has always been limited by the inability to get drugs across the blood-brain barrier. In fact, it's been nearly impossible to develop drugs that have both the right chemical structures to target CNS diseases, and to have, at the same time, structures that allow them to cross the blood-brain barrier. The two objectives are often completely incompatible. The Transcend platform may finally give the pharmaceutical industry the ability to design neurotherapeutics with the knowledge that, no matter a drug's chemical structure, the Transcend peptide can likely be used get it across the blood-brain barrier in a very natural and cost-effective manner. The unmet medical needs for this are huge. I want to thank the Bioasis board of directors and Rob Hutchison for this opportunity. I'm looking forward to leading the commercial and scientific advancement of the Transcend platform for the benefit of patients, our pharmaceutical industry partners and licensees, and for Bioasis shareholders. I'm looking forward to seeing where this can go."

About Bioasis Technologies Inc.

Bioasis is a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in the Vancouver, B.C., area, focused on overcoming the limitations of therapeutic drug delivery across the BBB. The company is developing and commercializing a proprietary brain delivery technology to address unmet medical needs in the treatment of central nervous system disorders.

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