Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Diem Nguyen is the CEO of Xalud Therapeutics, a DNA delivery gene therapy company striving to develop and deliver medicines for large, broad-based disease indications like chronic inflammatory diseases, particularly musculoskeletal diseases like osteoarthritis of the knee and as well as neurodegenerative diseases like MS and ALS. Earlier in her career, Diem was the global President of Pfizer, covering multiple therapeutic areas, and has joined Xalud because of their ground-breaking DNA delivery platform. Diem explains, "Gene therapy means a lot of things to a lot of people. And the first, I would say, is most people, when they think about gene therapies, think about viral AAV gene therapy. And a lot of promise is associated with that type of platform because you're seeing this potential, particularly in rare diseases. The challenges associated with AAV sometimes are the safety profile associated with that product. Our particular gene therapy is DNA gene therapy, so we do not have the challenges with genom