Gene&Cell Therapy >> Rapport hires CFO Troy Ignelzi from Karuna; Bristol Myers’
new CEO to chair the board next year: Troy Ignelzi
Troy Ignelzi happened into the biopharma world. He had dropped his sole college science course to go play racquetball with his then-girlfriend (now wife of 32 years).
But, years later, while working on economic development in the Kalamazoo, MI area, he helped support local biotech companies built by the scientists whom Pfizer was letting go in the late 1990s as part of an R&D shuffle. He hopped over to Eli Lilly in the early 2000s and has since helped multiple drug developers raise, collectively, more than $4 billion, including a few IPOs.
The most notable of those Nasdaq debuts was Karuna Therapeutics in the summer of 2019. Ignelzi recalls working on the Boston drugmaker’s IPO paperwork from nearly day one on the job. The leap onto Wall Street was a bit of a crunch, but in the years since, he helped Karuna do multiple public offerings, including one of the biggest in recent industry history, as the company worked to submit what could become the first new type of schizophrenia medicine in decades. That is the crowning achievement, in Ignelzi’s eyes, as KarXT would be the eighth approved treatment he’s helped finance.
“I’m even more proud of that than I am of the dollars that we’ve raised, because as a non-science, non-medical person, that’s my contribution, is to help raise money for what ultimately become products in the hands of patients,” Ignelzi said in an interview with Endpoints News.
In early August, Karuna announced he’d be leaving Karuna this fall. Within days, he reconnected with former scPharmaceuticals colleague Abraham Ceesay, who had recently become CEO of another CNS biotech, Rapport Therapeutics. A few weeks later, the Johnson & Johnson spinout and Third Rock-formed biotech would announce its second nine-figure financing of the year: a $150 million Series B that gives it runway into 2027.
Now, after a quick month-long break, Ignelzi is stepping back into the CFO post to help Rapport execute on various options. With so much in the bank and years of runway, Ignelzi and his new colleagues (as of Nov. 1) aren’t in a rush to put together an S-1.
The biotech’s lead asset, RAP-219, is in Phase I right now and will enter two Phase II trials next year, for epilepsy and a psychiatry indication, Ceesay told Endpoints in August.
“They’ll be able to get that data either as a public company or private, and that’s really how you build these companies, is to establish optionality,” Ignelzi said.
And in this market environment, the IPOs are few and far between (Ignelzi is on the board of Abivax, which just became dual-listed with its Nasdaq entry earlier this month).
At Rapport, he’ll be working with a familiar face: Karuna founder and science chief Steve Paul, who chairs his new… #lucidquest #genetherapy #celltherapy
