Mission

Develop therapeutics that ablate cancer stem cells


About Escend Pharmaceuticals

Escend is a privately held clinical-stage company. Our business model is to reduce drug development risk by screening, selecting, and developing foreign-approved drugs with known clinical safety for orphan cancer indications based on new mechanisms of action. Our unique compound screening processes help accelerate drug discovery and development time by utilizing parallel and integrative biological and medicinal chemistry approaches.

Escend creates new intellectual property centered around methods of use and composition claims to focus on new mechanisms of action details. We identify and match drug candidates with high clinical unmet disease indications to reduce clinical and regulatory approval risks.


The Escend Team

The Escend founders have collective experience in cancer research, drug discovery, drug delivery technologies, and clinical drug development.  In addition, our skills involve developing and implementing intellectual property strategies around compositions of matter and method of use claims. With our strong foundation, we utilize several approaches to identify small molecules with previous pre-clinical and clinical experience that can be utilized for accelerated development as novel therapeutics. 

Team

Saira Bates, MBA
Co-Founder & CEO

Neil Sankar, MD
Medical Director & Safety Monitoring

Mark Jaros, PhD
Data Management & Statistics

Sarath Kanekal
DVM, PhD, DABT, RA
Pharmacology, Toxicology & Regulatory

Diann Nagami
CMC & Regulatory

Dennis Brown, PhD
Co-Founder & Chairman

Mike Li, MS
Chemistry, Manufacturing & Controls (CMC)

Advisors

Jorge Cortes, MD
Professor, Director, Georgia Cancer Center, Augusta University

Susan O’Brien, MD
Professor, Division of Hematology/Oncology, University of California, Irvine

Shaoguang Li, MD, PhD
Professor, Department of Medicine, UMass Chan Medical School