Please could you walk us through your career path to becoming CEO at Trevi?
Yes, of course. I started off in accounting at Ernst and Young and worked in a lot of different industries. I was drawn to biotech very early in my career. I wasn't a scientist, but I could certainly understand the importance of solving unmet medical needs and the innovation side of things.
So, my career path journeyed through biotech. I ended up becoming a CFO, and eventually CEO, of a prior company which was eventually acquired by our partner. Coming off that experience, I co-founded Trevi. My background grew through finance, which of course, is super important in biotech. As you know, it's expensive to develop drugs, and I’ve found that I have become a good reality partner for a lot of the scientists and drug developers that are doing a lot of the heavy lifting. And then, it is my job to ensure we are adequately financed to execute on our plans.
I founded this company with a neurologist, Dr. Thomas Sciascia, about 10 years ago. It's been an amazing journey, trying to get the company from our kitchen tables (literally) and bring it all the way to the patient. We're now a publicly traded NASDAQ company with just under a $2 billion market cap, so have seen a lot of things during that run.
How does HaduvioTM work differently from standard cough treatments?
The interesting thing about the investigational therapy Haduvio (nalbuphine ER) is that it sits broadly within the opioid class of drugs, but it's in this subcategory called mixed agonist-antagonists. There were four drugs developed, which were designed decades ago to get away from all the addiction problems. When you think about drugs that are addictive, like fentanyl or morphine, those are all mu-agonists.
