William L. Rumsey, Ph.D.
Vice President and CSO, Director, Co-founder
Dr. Rumsey has more than 30 years of experience in major Pharma bringing new medicines to the marketplace. He has led teams at Bristol-Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca and GSK culminating in 9 clinical candidates for diverse applications and different routes of administration; respiratory, urinary incontinence, major depression, pulmonary hypertension, cardiovascular; 3 FTIH, 1 in-licensed GSK product (VOLIBRIS) and 3 in-house GSK inhaled products (INCRUSE, ANORA, and TRELEGY). Throughout this period he formed multiple collaborative alliances with academia and external companies to bring in novel science, technical transfer, and to organize symposia. He maintained dual research appointments in academia (University of Pennsylvania Medical School Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics where he was a post-doctoral fellow) and Pharma to apply “state of the art” optical imaging technology to drug discovery. Together with his collaborators, he has applied analysis of mitochondrial genetics to chronic disease and identified mtDNA as a potential translational biomarker for bridging pre-clinical and clinical outcomes.
Dr. Rumsey has conceived and implemented new research unit based on oxidative stress, proposed multiple innovative targets and initiated programs that progressed to clinical development, e.g., NRF2 activation for respiratory, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases. Co-invented (FTIH) and filed multiple “use” patents for several diseases. He has authored pre-clinical pharmacology sections for multiple marketed drugs, received multiple Pharma awards, mentored several undergraduate/graduate students, post-doctoral and clinical fellows written more than 80 original manuscripts published in high impact journals e.g., Science, Nature, book chapters, patents and presented at international meetings.
