Stephen Ruoss

Inverseon, Inc. is a private company developing a re-profiled beta blocker for the treatment of asthma and COPD. Inverseon’s scientific approach, “Paradoxical Pharmacology”, is based on observations that chronic effects of inverse agonist drugs are completely opposite to their acute effects. A similar paradigm shift occurred in the late 1990’s with the approval of the first beta blocker for congestive heart failure, a disease state where the drug was also originally contraindicated. Inverseon’s scientific founder, Professor Richard Bond, identified the mechanism of action as inverse agonism at the beta adrenergic receptor and hypothesized that this observation represented a general pharmacological phenomenon and identified asthma as another disease to target. To date, the company has achieved a number of important milestones: completing two open-label Phase 2a studies demonstrating a dose-response, a comment in The Lancet in 2009 highlighting the published human clinical trial, and 2009 issuance of their first U.S. patent.