Ring Therapeutics Announces Appointment of Industry Veteran Christopher Wright, M.D., Ph.D. as Chief Medical Officer, Head of Translational Research

Cambridge, Mass. – January 30, 2023 – Ring Therapeutics, a life sciences company founded by Flagship Pioneering to revolutionize gene therapy with its commensal virome platform, today announced the appointment of Christopher Wright, M.D., Ph.D. as Chief Medical Officer, Head of Translational Research, effective February 7, 2023. Dr. Wright brings over two decades of clinical, medical research and drug development experience to the team.

“We welcome the addition of Chris to the team as Ring’s first Chief Medical Officer and Head of Translational Research,” said Tuyen Ong. M.D., MBA, Chief Executive Officer at Ring Therapeutics and CEO-Partner at Flagship Pioneering. “His extensive experience both in the clinic as a practicing physician and in industry developing gene therapies will be critical to successfully launching our novel anellovirus-based candidates into the clinic. Fueled by our discovery of commensal anellovirus biology, Ring’s revolutionary Anellogy platform can build vectors that deliver diverse therapeutic modalities to a wide array of tissues. Chris will be instrumental to realizing Ring’s aspirations to disrupt and transform the genetic medicine space with this next generation technology, ultimately providing a potentially safe and effective option for patients in need.”

Dr. Wright added, “This is an exciting time to join the Ring team as we work to build a novel programmable approach to overcome some of the largest limitations of current viral-based therapies. Most notable of these limitations include toxicity, immunogenicity and tissue tropism. Ring’s Anellogy platform may offer a solution to address each of these through harnessing the unique properties of commensal viruses to create potentially redosable and highly tropic therapies to address a multitude of diseases, all without triggering a neutralizing immune response. I look forward to working with this experienced team to advance these novel therapies into the clinic.”

Prior to joining Ring, Dr. Wright served as Chief Medical Officer of AavantiBio, Inc., a gene therapy company which was recently acquired by Solid Biosciences. Previously, Dr. Wright served as Chief Medical Officer at Cyclerion, and Senior Vice President/Chief Development Officer at Ironwood Pharmaceuticals. Before Ironwood, Dr. Wright held numerous executive positions at pharma companies including Axcella Health. Inc. and Vertex Pharmaceuticals. Prior to his industry roles, Dr. Wright was an Associate Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and a board-certified practicing neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital for 20 years. Dr. Wright earned an A.B. in biochemical sciences from Harvard University, an M.D. and MMSc. from Harvard Medical School and a Ph.D. in neurosciences from Vrije University in the Netherlands. He currently serves on the Board of Directors at Alkermes plc, and as Scientific Advisor at Cyclerion Therapeutics, Inc.

About the Anellogy™ Platform

Commensal anelloviruses have co-habited and co-evolved with humans over millions of years, yet they have remained largely understudied and untapped. Ring has developed the world’s first and only platform, the Anellogy™ platform, to discover and harness the unique characteristics of these viruses as programmable medicines capable of delivering a wide array of payloads including DNA and RNA in a highly-tropic, redosable manner. Through its Anellogy™ platform, Ring has developed the largest anellovirus database to date, having sequenced and identified over 5,000 anelloviruses from human samples. Ring has already begun harnessing this expansive diversity which offers tremendous optionality with respect to tissue- and cellular-level tropism, vectorization, in vitro assembly and paradigm-shifting manufacturing modularity.