Vedanta Biosciences, a company developing a new class of therapies designed to modulate the human microbiome, has announced the appointment Daniel E. Couto as Senior Vice President of Process Development and Manufacturing and named Jeremiah Faith, Ph.D., from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, to its Scientific Advisory Board.
Couto joins Vedanta as Senior Vice President of Process Development and Manufacturing and will work out of the Company’s new headquarters and research and development facility in Cambridge, MA, including a state-of-the-art Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) facility for the production of live bacterial drugs. Couto has 25 years of experience in biotechnology, biologics drug development and cGMP manufacturing, including at Merck Sharp Dohme Biologics UK (former Avecia Biologics) where he served as Vice President of Commercial Manufacturing Operations and was responsible for late stage and commercial manufacturing operations. In addition, Couto has held senior positions with several biotech companies including Nuvelo, Genzyme Transgenics and Advanced Biosystems and, most recently, was Senior Vice President of Manufacturing and Facilities Operations at ContraFect Corporation where he was responsible for all CMC, Supply Chain, QA and Facilities.
Vedanta also named Jeremiah Faith, Ph.D. to its Scientific Advisory Board. Dr. Faith is Assistant Professor, Clinical Immunology and Genetics and Genomic Sciences, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, where his work focuses on the manipulation of the gut microbiota, the interactions between our gut microbes and our immune system, and the development of new computational and experimental technologies to better model and assay the interactions between our gut microbes and our health. He has recently authored multiple high impact publications inScience, Science Translational Medicine and PNAS studying microbe-host relationships using bacterial consortia, the stability of the human microbiota and its response to diet, and bacterial culture methods.