Neovacs names new medical and scientific advisor

Neovacs has appointed Dr. Virginia Pascual as Medical and Scientific advisor, it said Thursday.

“We are delighted to welcome Dr Pascual to Neovacs. Her significant contribution to lupus research and practical knowledge of new treatment approaches, and in particular the role of interferon alpha¹, will be key to the next stage of Neovacs’ development. This will be of particular importance for the phase 3 clinical trial protocol and for all others pathologies linked to the neutralization of Interferon alpha such as the ongoing Type 1 Diabetes program” said Miguel Sieler, CEO of Neovacs.”

Dr. Virginia Pascual, MD, is the Founding Director of the Gale and Ira Drukier Institute for Children’s Health at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. Her research work has been published in many prestigious scientific revues, she has received multiple awards for her discoveries, from the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases, and in 2017 the “Lupus Insight Prize” for highly promising research into understanding the events leading to lupus flares.  
Before joining the Drukier Institute in New York, Dr Pascual served at the Baylor Institute for Immunology Research in Dallas as Director of the Centre for Inflammation and Genomics. She received her medical degree at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid and specialised in pediatric rheumatology at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, TX.

As of today, the IFNa Kinoid is the only therapeutic vaccine that has brought positive clinical phase IIb results applying the LLDAS score. This has allowed the clinical and scientific community to envisage a clinical improvement in a patient’s condition enabling a significant reduction in corticosteroid treatments.

As a reminder, lupus is a complex disease with multiple symptoms and the LLDAS is a promising clinical score having reached a wide consensus among the medical and scientific community worldwide. LLDAS has very recently been accepted as primary clinical endpoint by the Chinese FDA.