FACIO THERAPIES

Facio Therapies is a single-minded pharmaceutical company. Their focus is entirely on one disease: FSHD – short for facioscapulohumeral dystrophy. Despite over 35 years of basic research into FSHD, there is no approved therapy. In the early teens of this century, the consensus emerged that FSHD is caused by the presence in skeletal muscle of a protein that should not be there. That scientific breakthrough sparked hope throughout the FSHD community, but has proven difficult to translate into r... eal progress towards a therapy. In September 2014, three prominent members of the FSHD community decided to take matters into their own hands. Kees van der Graaf (Netherlands), a former member of the Board of Directors of Unilever; Bill Moss AO, a former executive director of the Australian investment bank, Macquarie Group; and Neil Camarta (Canada), President and CEO of Western Hydrogen Ltd and a former executive at Shell, jointly founded Facio Therapies. Kees’s elder son, Bart, has FSHD. Bill and Neil have FSHD themselves.More