IANDIT Seminar Series: The Future of Drug Development through Companion Diagnostics and Therapeutics approaches


Wednesday, December 7, 2022
2:00pm-3:00pm


Roseburgh Building, RS207
164 College St.


Institute for Advanced Non-Destructive and Non-Invasive Diagnostic Technologies (IANDIT) Seminar Series

The Future of Drug Development through Companion Diagnostics and Therapeutics approaches

Speaker: Nathan Yoganathan, President & Chief Scientific Officer
JN Nova Pharma Inc.

Abstract:  Dr. Nathan Yoganathan, President & CSO of JN Nova Pharma will be presenting their novel technology. JN Nova is a pre-clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, focused on efficiently developing innovative treatments that address significant unmet medical needs. JN Nova’s lead product candidate, JN2019 is a novel anti-COVID-19 molecule. The company is collaborating with Canadian Government labs and Canadian academic centers to accelerate its COVID-19 therapeutic development. This proprietary drug class blocks pan-COVID infection from all variants, with important renal, cardiovascular, and pulmonary protective properties. The lead therapeutic molecules are corona-viral neutralizing agents which trap and inhibit viral entry to the lungs via an enhanced ACE2 enzymatic decoy and cause viral clearance via immunological conjugation and have full ACE2 enzyme replacement activity, supporting protection from acute kidney injury and enhanced recovery from the acute respiratory syndrome in ICU settings.  Extremely potent vs emergent viral variants: drugs will be developed as accessible, rapidly administered therapeutic interventions in symptomatic pre-hospitalized and early symptomatic hospitalized patients for people that are infected by these vaccine-escape mutants, such as Delta, Omicron, and beyond.

The Institute for Advanced Non-Destructive and Non-Invasive Diagnostic Technologies (IANDIT) in the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering presents its inaugural guest speaker seminar series with Dr Nathan Yoganathan. The IANDIT  seminar series features leading experts in Non-Destructive Evaluation (NDE) and Non-Invasive Bio-diagnostics (NIB) research in manufacturing industry and healthcare sector in Ontario and beyond.

JN Nova is interested in collaborating with UofT scientists and engineers to develop non-invasive COVID-19 related technologies including detection and treatment.

Interested members of the U of T community who would like to attend the seminars and meet the speaker can email to iandit@mie.utoronto.ca.

Biography

Dr. T. Nathan Yoganathan is currently the President and Chief Scientific Officer of JN Nova Pharma Inc. Dr. Yoganathan is a university and industrial research scientist, turned entrepreneur who became an experienced CEO, having successfully launched several private and a public biotechnology companies. He has over twenty-five years of experience in scientific research in cell signaling and gene expression technology and instrumentation, has published several articles, and is an inventor of many patents.

Dr. Yoganathan is the recipient of numerous awards, including from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Thyroid Foundation of Canada. He serves on a number of advisory boards for both government and industry, including the CIHR Strategic Training Program in the Bioinformatics Advisory Board, BIOTE Canada’s Emerging Companies Advisory Board, and past member of the Ontario Research Fund Advisory Board. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology. Dr. Yoganathan was a faculty member of the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto, and was affiliated with the Lunenfeld and Tanenbaum Research Institute of Mount Sinai Hospital. He holds a B.Sc. (Honours) from the University of North London, a M.Sc. from the University of Sussex, and a Ph.D. from the University of Oslo.

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