World MS Day Special: Immunic reveals new hope for progressive MS

Hello, and welcome to Beyond Biotech, the weekly podcast from La BioTech. I'm Dylan Kossain, and this is episode 199 for the podcast. For our two hundredth show next week, we've got something special planned, and you won't wanna miss it. Today, though, I'm delighted to welcome doctor Daniel Witt, CEO of Munich Therapeutics to the show. With World MS Day being tomorrow, the May 30, this is the perfect moment to focus on multiple sclerosis, a disease that affects nearly three million people worldwide and still leaves many patients searching for better options. In today's episode, Daniel shares his own journey into biotechnology, walks us through what life with MS really looks like for patients, and explains the science behind Munich's most advanced program, Immu eight three eight. We discuss what makes Munich's oral therapy different from today's treatments, uncover the latest data from the CALIPR and NURE trials, and talk about the future of MS care. So whether you live with MS, care for someone who does, or simply want to understand the latest progress in neurology, I hope you enjoy my discussion with Daniel Witt. Daniel, welcome to Beyond Biotech. Yeah. Happy to be here today. Daniel, why don't you start by telling us a little bit about your background? What drew you into biotech? What drew you to immunology? Actually, trained as a medicine chemist, it is always it was always my passion to do something good and to translate ideas, technologies, consents into drugs to to treat diseases, and from the very beginning. And it all started at university when I developed, a new technology for insulico screening, which today is AI, basically. And so I had the opportunity to start my first company in in the late nineties. And doing that, that also brought me into the program development into really real drug design and and synthesis. And, and therefore, I I think this this is just continue until today, using my whole professional life. How did you come to join in Munich, and, you know, where have you been focusing there in your role as CEO? Munich is just a logical consequence of my first company for SC where I spent almost nineteen years, translating the technology into into drug development. Because I'm a cofounder of Munich, in the year 2016, and and part of the founding team, team, I was able to buy my favorite molecule from my old company, and to to bring that into Munich as as the crystallization point of starting the company and now bring it into phase three meanwhile. So that that brought me in here. And, the role of the CEO was not, the first thing I thought about, but clearly, if you're passionate about a drug, you need to make sure it's financed properly. So I took over the role of the CEO, and, I I think, really brought the company from from a four people start up to a hundred hundred people phase three …