Protaganist Therapeutics CEO Details Plans to take Oral IBD Treatment and Other Blockbuster Drugs to Market

March 20, 2019

Dinesh V. Patel, Ph.D., is Director, President and CEO of Protagonist Therapeutics, Inc. Dr. Patel has served as a member of the board of directors and as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Protagonist since December 2008. He has 33 years of executive, entrepreneurial and scientific experience that span the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and biopharmaceutical industries.

Prior to joining Protagonist Therapeutics, Dr. Patel served from 2006 to 2008 as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Arete Therapeutics, a privately held company focused on novel drugs for metabolic syndrome. Previously, he was the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Miikana Therapeutics, an oncology-based company, from 2003 until acquired by Entremed — later renamed CASI Pharmaceuticals — in 2005. Prior to Miikana, Dr. Patel was a founding member at Versicor — now Vicuron — where he held positions of increasing responsibility from 1996 to 2003.

Vicuron has two marketed drugs, anidulafungin, or Eraxis, and dalbavancin, or Dalvance, and it was acquired by Pfizer in 2005 in a $1.9 billion cash transaction. From 1993 to 1996, Dr. Patel was a director of chemistry at the combinatorial chemistry company Affymax.

Dr. Patel was a medicinal chemist at Bristol-Myers Squibb from 1985 to 1993. Dr. Patel received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Rutgers University, New Jersey and his B.S. in industrial chemistry from S. P. University, Vallabh Vidyanagar, India.

In this exclusive 2,554 word interview in the Wall Street Transcript, Dr. Patel details his road map for his company Protaganist Therapeutics.

“The second category is represented by PTG-200 and PN-943, which are oral drugs for inflammatory bowel disease — IBD. The oral delivery method is the first difference in comparison to PTG-300. Also, while PTG-300 was an agonist or a mimetic, these are antagonists.

The third difference is, while PTG-300 is focused on rare diseases, PTG-200 and PTG-943 are focused on inflammatory bowel diseases, which affect many patients worldwide.

When you look at IBD, the prominent products are Humira, Remicade and Stelara, all of which are multibillion-dollar blockbuster drugs. These are top-selling drugs of modern times. Protagonist is going after the same biological mechanisms that have been validated by these multibillion-dollar injectable antibodies; however, our uniqueness is that our drugs are oral.”

Get the complete picture of the status of these important medical developments by reading the entire 2,554 word interview, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript.