Gain Therapeutics: a first-in-class, disease-modifying therapy for Parkinson's

Hello, and welcome to Beyond Biotech, the weekly podcast from Labiatek. I'm Dylan Kossain, and this is episode 208 for the podcast. Today, I'm delighted to welcome Jean Mack, president and CEO of GAIN Therapeutics. With over twenty five years of experience spanning biochemistry, Wall Street analysis, and biotech leadership, Jean brings deep expertise in capital markets, strategy, and drug development. He joined GAIN in 2024 and stepped into the CEO role in early twenty twenty five. GAIN Therapeutics is a clinical stage biotech pioneering next generation allosteric small molecule therapies. Using its proprietary Magellan platform, which combines three d structural biology and physics based modeling, the company is unlocking novel treatments for challenging disorders. Their lead candidate is advancing towards phase two as a potential first in class disease modifying therapy for Parkinson's disease, with promising phase one b data showing biomarker improvements and functional benefits. In this episode, we'll explore Gene's journey, GAIN's innovative strategy, the Parkinson's landscape, and the future of AI in biotech. Gene, welcome to Beyond Biotech. Thank you, Dylan. Nice to be here. Gene, walk me through your early interest in biochemistry. How did it, shape your career? How did you get into the life sciences? Yeah. So okay. The origin story. I guess that begins, kind of with some curiosity around medicine. I have family members, a fair amount of family members who are physicians. It seemed to be one of the more respected, avenues to take if you want to respect, you know, in the Mac household. So so I I slowly gravitated over, medicine, strongly influenced probably by my older brother's a cardiothoracic surgeon. I went, to undergrad. I went, you know, undergrad and and did, you know, I enjoyed biochemistry. I enjoyed the science, so I moved further into it. I wanted to be a neurosurgeon. When I got out of undergrad and prior to medical school, I did a, a research fellowship, hybrid kind of thing at Columbia University in their department of interventional neuroradiology, which is a big mouse cell. These are basically guys who did, video, and contrast imaging of the brain and the cerebrovasculature. And the department that I worked for mainly tried to diagnose, these, arterial venous malformations, these horrible networks of, un you know, malorganized, vasculature in the in the in the in the brain that could be leaky and bleed and create all sorts of neurological deficits, for patients. So, we were on the cutting edge of that about thirty years ago at Columbia University. Maybe about five or six guys on the planet could do, what this department could do. So we got patients from all over as well as, you know, in Washington Heights, New York, you're dealing with gunshot wounds too at some point. And I was in the room a lot of time during operations because we would, the department I worked for did all kinds of clinical trials and was doing all kinds of studies, some for devices, …