Daryl Drummond | Chief Scientific Officer
Akagera Medicines, Inc

Daryl has 30 years of experience in the research and development of liposomal and lipidic nanoparticle (LNP) based therapeutics and vaccines.  Daryl is currently the Founder, Chief Scientific Officer, and Senior Vice President of Akagera Medicines, an African owned Biotech company focused on bringing state of the art technologies, therapeutics, and vaccines to the African continent. At Akagera, he is advancing the use of sophisticated lipid-based nanotechnologies to deliver novel and highly potent anti-bacterial agents directly to innate immune cell reservoirs for mycobacterium or gram-positive bacterium and mRNA vaccines, targeting some of the world’s most challenging and neglected infectious diseases.  Daryl also joined Tidal Therapeutics in 2019 as an SAB member, and later as the Interim Chief Scientific Officer, prior to being acquired by Sanofi in April 2021.  At Tidal he oversaw the engineering and pharmacology of immune cell-targeted mRNA lipid nanoparticles (LNPs).   Through June of 2019, Dr. Drummond served as the Head of Research and Senior Vice President of Discovery for Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, a public biotechnology company headquartered in Cambridge, MA, where he oversaw the discovery efforts for Merrimack’s Nanotherapeutics and Biologics-based therapeutics. Dr. Drummond received a Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry from Indiana University in 1997, with an emphasis on membrane biochemistry and biophysics, and later completed a postdoc under the renowned father of lipid-based drug delivery systems, Demetrios Papahadjopoulos at California Pacific Medical Center in 1999.   Dr. Drummond was a principle inventor for a wide range of nanotechnology-based drugs and platform technologies, most notably Onivyde, a highly stabilized liposomal formulation of irinotecan that was approved for the treatment of metastatic pancreatic cancer.  He joined Merrimack in 2009 following the merger of Merrimack with Hermes Biosciences.  Overall, Dr. Drummond has more than 30 years of experience in the research and development of advanced drug delivery systems, including five unique drugs or imaging agents that have been tested in various clinical trials, an NDA and EMA approval for Onivyde, >40 issued patents or patent applications, and more than 75 peer reviewed publications. The focus of his research at Merrimack had been in developing targeted nanotherapeutics for treating a wide range of solid tumors.  He successfully developed novel platform technologies for targeting lipidic nanocarriers such as liposomes or lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) using a range of novel ligands, but most notably Fab’ or scFv antibody fragments.  He has also developed platform technologies for dramatically improving the in vivo drug retention of difficult to stabilize small molecule drugs, and for systemic delivery of nucleic acids.  Three of these nanotherapeutics were studied in clinical trials, including an ErbB2-targeted liposomal doxorubicin which was evaluated in a Phase II study in ErbB2-overexpressing breast cancers and a nanoliposomal formulation of irinotecan which was approved by both the EMA and FDA following promising results in a Phase III trial in gemcitabine-refractory pancreatic cancer.  Onivyde completed a successful phase III clinical trial in front line pancreatic cancer in combination with oxaliplatin and 5FU in late 2022 and was later approved by the US FDA for the same indication.