SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Feb. 01, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MyoKardia, Inc. (Nasdaq:MYOK), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical
company pioneering a precision medicine approach for the treatment of heritable cardiovascular diseases, today announced the
appointment of June Lee, M.D., as chief operating officer, and Radhika Tripuraneni, M.D., as vice president, medical affairs.
"I am thrilled to welcome these two exceptional life sciences leaders to the MyoKardia team at this pivotal time as we expand
our pipeline and advance new clinical candidates,” said Tassos Gianakakos, chief executive officer. “Their expertise and counsel
will broaden our base of leadership and support our mission to change the world for patients with serious cardiovascular
disease.”
Dr. Lee, the Company’s new chief operating officer, comes to MyoKardia with significant early-stage development and portfolio
experience. She will be accountable for establishing MyoKardia’s portfolio planning function, as well as leading the project
management and project team leader functions.
Previously, Dr. Lee was on the faculty of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she was director of
the Catalyst program at the Clinical and Translational Science Institute and a professor at the School of Medicine. Catalyst is an
internal UCSF accelerator for therapeutics, devices, diagnostics, and digital health technologies. A key focus of Dr. Lee’s work
was identifying the most compelling discovery research and enabling and supporting its commercialization. Previously, she worked in
early clinical development in cardiovascular, metabolism, respiratory, and infectious diseases at Genentech.
Dr. Lee completed her undergraduate work in chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University and earned her M.D. degree at the School
of Medicine at University of California, Davis.
Dr. Radhika Tripuraneni, vice president, medical affairs, will lead MyoKardia’s medical affairs function, furthering the
Company’s development of rare cardiovascular therapeutics. Dr. Tripuraneni brings more than 10 years of experience across multiple
therapeutic areas, including rare and cardiovascular diseases, with particularly valuable expertise building medical affairs teams
in diseases where no approved therapies exist.
Most recently, Dr. Tripuraneni was vice president, medical affairs, at Synageva BioPharma (later Alexion Pharmaceuticals) where
she worked closely with physicians, medical societies and patient groups to further disease awareness and support clinical trial
enrollment and execution. Previously, she was a cardiovascular medical director at Gilead Sciences, and served as global
medical director and global medical affairs lead for two therapeutic areas at Genzyme.
Dr. Tripuraneni holds undergraduate degrees in business administration and liberal arts, and an M.D. degree from The University
of Missouri. She did her surgical internship at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, a major teaching hospital of
Harvard Medical School. She earned a master’s of public health degree from Harvard University.
About MyoKardia
MyoKardia is a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company pioneering a precision medicine approach to discover, develop and
commercialize targeted therapies for the treatment of serious and rare cardiovascular diseases. MyoKardia’s initial focus is on the
treatment of heritable cardiomyopathies, a group of rare, genetically-driven forms of heart failure that result from biomechanical
defects in cardiac muscle contraction. MyoKardia has used its precision medicine platform to generate a pipeline of therapeutic
programs for the chronic treatment of the two most prevalent forms of heritable cardiomyopathy—hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, or HCM,
and dilated cardiomyopathy, or DCM. MyoKardia’s most advanced product candidate, MYK-461, is an orally-administered small molecule
designed to reduce excessive cardiac muscle contractility leading to HCM and has been evaluated in three Phase 1 clinical trials.
MyoKardia is currently studying MYK-461 in the Phase 2 PIONEER-HCM trial in symptomatic, obstructive HCM (oHCM), a subset of HCM
for which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Orphan Drug Designation. MYK-491, the second clinical candidate
generated by MyoKardia’s product engine, is designed to increase the overall force of the heart’s contraction in DCM patients by
increasing cardiac contractility. MyoKardia is currently evaluating MYK-491 in a Phase 1 study in healthy volunteers; topline data
is expected in the third quarter of 2017. A cornerstone of the MyoKardia platform is the Sarcomeric Human Cardiomyopathy Registry,
or SHaRe, a multi-center, international repository of clinical and laboratory data on individuals and families with genetic heart
disease, which MyoKardia helped form in 2014. MyoKardia believes that SHaRe, currently consisting of data from approximately 10,000
individuals, is the world’s largest registry of patients with heritable cardiomyopathies. MyoKardia’s mission is to change the
world for patients with serious cardiovascular disease through bold and innovative science. For more information, please visit
www.myokardia.com.
Investor Contact: Beth DelGiacco Stern Investor Relations, Inc. 212-362-1200 beth@sternir.com Media Contact: Steven Cooper Edelman 415-486-3264 steven.cooper@edelman.com
