Naurex Founder Joseph Moskal to Give Farley Fellows Talk

With two rapid-acting antidepressants currently in clinical development, Naurex, Inc. is one of the hottest biotech companies in the country. It has raised $63 million in financing, and its drugs are so promising that they received the coveted FDA fast-track designation in order to get to patients faster.

Joseph Moskal, founder and chief scientific officer of Naurex and research professor of biomedical engineering, will discuss his experiences in the drug discovery industry during the next Farley Fellows Seminar at 4 p.m. Wednesday, June 4 in the ITW Classroom at the Ford Motor Company Engineering and Design Center.

During the seminar, Moskal will recount his long journey to success, the persistence it took to get there, and the failures along the way.

The idea for new neuropharmaceuticals grew out of research that Moskal conducted in 1983. In 1990 he joined Northwestern, where he founded the Falk Center for Molecular Therapeutics. Naurex, which was created 16 years later, was the fourth company to grow out of Moskal’s research but the first to succeed. Even yet, Naurex went through several CEOs, vigorous intellectual property creation, and persistent drug manufacturing before it landed on the right combination of factors and blossomed as a company.

Now Naurex has two therapies in Phase 2 clinical trials: GLYX-13 for patients with difficult-to-treat depression, and NRX-1074, for the treatment of major depressive disorder.