DENISE BARBUT, MD FRCP FCPP
Senior Advisor
Dr. Barbut is a physician-scientist and entrepreneur with decades of experience in medical device and drug development. She is a Professor of Neurology, formerly at Cornell University and has founded and led several biotech companies.
She received her MD from University College, London. She trained as a neurologist at Imperial College and the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery (Queen’s Square), London. She completed her neurologic training at Weill-Cornell Medical Center. Subsequently she became an Attending Physician at New York Hospital and Professor of Neurology at Cornell University where she was Chief of the Neurovascular Division and the Stroke Research Program.
Early in her career, she was interested in pain and discovered Substance P in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord and Neurotensin in the trigeminal ganglion and helped elucidate their role in neuropathic pain. She subsequently became interested in neurologic complications arising from embolization and developed arterial filtration devices for use during vascular procedures. She discovered methods for cerebral protection during brain injury and developed non-invasive, preferential cerebral cooling techniques for cerebral protection during cardiac arrest. Her research interests in the last decade have focused on the role of aminosterols in health and disease, and their application to the prevention and treatment of neurodegenerative and neurometabolic diseases. In 2015 she co-founded Enterin with Michael Zasloff to develop Squalamine for the treatment of Parkinson’s Disease. She designed and conducted 2 highly successful trials in Parkinson’s Disease. Recently, she co-founded BAZ-Therapeutics with Michael Zasloff to develop novel compounds.
She is the lead author on ~300 patents and the lead or senior author on ~100 peer-reviewed articles. She has been involved in founding, funding, and running biotech companies for 28 years. She is currently the co-founder and CEO of BAZ-Therapeutics, focused on reversing age-related diseases, including cancer.