MapLight Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company working to develop targeted novel therapeutics to improve the lives of patients suffering from debilitating CNS disorders, today announced the appointment of Vishwas Setia as Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Setia succeeds Jonathan Gillis, who will transition to Chief Administrative and Accounting Officer.
“I am pleased to welcome Vish to our leadership team at this pivotal time for MapLight,” said Christopher Kroeger, MD, MBA, MapLight’s Chief Executive Officer and Founder. “He brings extensive capital markets and strategic experience that will be invaluable to MapLight. The addition of Vish and transition of Jon to Chief Administrative and Accounting Officer both support MapLight’s expansion during this time of significant progress across our pipeline.”
“I am delighted to join MapLight at this exciting time,” said Mr. Setia. “MapLight is well positioned to rapidly advance its broad pipeline, including its product candidate targeting muscarinic receptors for the treatment of schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease psychosis. I look forward to leading the finance function and collaborating with the team to support the company’s growth and mission.”
Prior to joining MapLight, Mr. Setia was a Managing Director in the healthcare investment banking group at Bank of America Securities. He brings a decade of investment banking experience across the biopharma industry, helping to execute over $15 billion in equity and equity-linked financings and more than $100 billion in M&A and partnership transactions. He holds an M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Delhi College of Engineering, India.
About Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a serious, debilitating mental illness characterized by disturbances in perception, thinking, emotional reaction, and behavior. Schizophrenia can cause people to interpret reality abnormally and includes a combination of positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms. Approximately 60% of people with schizophrenia have no response or only a partial response to the available standard of care treatments, leaving a substantial portion of the population with urgent unmet needs.
About Alzheimer’s Disease Psychosis
Approximately 40% of people in the United States who are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) also experience symptoms of psychosis. These symptoms are associated with a worsened prognosis and are predictive of earlier progression to nursing home care, severe dementia and death. Despite the severity of the condition, there are no therapies approved by the FDA for the treatment of AD psychosis.
About MapLight Therapeutics MapLight is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on improving the lives of patients suffering from debilitating central nervous system, or CNS, disorders. We were founded by globally-recognized leaders in psychiatry and neuroscience research to address the lack of circuit-specific pharmacotherapies available for patients. Our discovery platform holds the potential to fill this void by identifying neural circuits causally linked to disease and targeting those circuits for therapeutic modulation.
Learn more at www.maplightrx.com.
