Date: Nov 01, 2013 Author: Gary Haber Source: bizjournals (
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GrayBug LLC, a startup ophthalmic drug company spun out of Johns Hopkins University's Wilmer Eye Institute, has hired its first full-time CEO and raised $1.5 million in new venture capital funding.
Michael O'Rourke, a veteran pharmaceutical industry executive and consultant, joined Baltimore-based GrayBug on Oct. 15. He comes to the company as it closed $1.5 million in funding from investors including the Maryland Venture Fund, the Abell Foundation and Brown Advisory, the Baltimore asset management firm.
O'Rourke, 54, ran eye care giant Bausch + Lomb's U.S. ophthalmic drug business in Tampa until 2009, when he started his own consulting firm, advising European ophthalmic companies on how to enter the U.S. market and U.S. companies on how to break into the European market.
The native of Scotland is no stranger to GrayBug. He served as one of the company's scientific advisers for the past two years.
GrayBug is developing drugs to treat glaucoma and wet age-related macular degeneration, two of the leading causes of blindness in adults. O'Rourke's task will be shepherding those drugs into clinical trials, which he hopes to do by about 2015. The $1.5 million in venture capital funding GrayBug received will help move those drugs into clinical trials, he said.
The company has received $2.5 million in funding since it was launched in 2011. That includes $200,000 from the Maryland Biotechnology Center in 2011.
In addition to developing its own drugs for the eye, O'Rourke also wants to form partnerships with larger ophthalmic drug makers that could use GrayBug's drug-delivery technology in their own products. Large pharmaceutical companies are turning increasingly to smaller companies for innovative drugs and technology they can use to stock their drug development pipelines. O'Rourke also sees the potential for GrayBug to develop other drugs to treat eye conditions, including one that would prevent patients from rejecting corneal transplants.
O'Rourke will be heading to New Orleans later this month for the American Academy of Ophthalmology convention where he plans to spread the word about GrayBug to others in the industry. The annual convention attracts about 25,000 people.
GrayBug's four founders are Justin Hanes, the Lewis J. Ort Professor of Ophthalmology at the Wilmer Eye Institute, Dr. Peter J. McDonnell, the Institute's chairman and Dr. Peter Campochiaro, a Wilmer Institute faculty member.
Christy Wyskiel, the fourth co-founder, was recently named a senior adviser to Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels. She advises Daniels on enterprise development, including commercializing research conducted at Hopkins and turning it into commercial products and services.
