Akouos, Gregory Robinson
Akouos appoints Gregory Robinson to the position of chief scientific officer at the company. Robinson held the same role at Nightstar Therapeutics, a biotech that was bought out by Biogen earlier this year.
There will be overlap between the science covered at Robinson’s new company and his last, with Akouos focused on gene therapies to restore hearing and Nightstar having focused on gene therapies for retinal diseases.
“In the past year, Akouos has made substantial progress advancing our gene therapy pipeline and establishing the leading precision genetic medicine platform focused on inner ear disorders,” said Manny Simons, CEO of Akouos.
Currently, all of its product candidates are preclinical, with the company targeting monogenic deafness and syndromic hearing loss, amongst others. Its lead candidate is AK-OTOF, a gene therapy that uses AAV vectors to deliver a copy of the OTOF gene to cochlear hair cells.