BOSTON & LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NightstaRx Limited, a clinical-stage gene therapy company developing treatments for inherited retinal diseases, today announced that the company has appointed industry finance veteran David Lubner to its board of directors. Mr. Lubner will serve as chair of the company’s audit committee.

“We are very pleased to welcome David to our board of directors and look forward to his contributions alongside the very strong team we have already built at Nightstar,” said David Fellows, chief executive officer of Nightstar. “David brings decades of experience leading the finance function at both private and publicly-traded biotechnology companies, which will be invaluable as Nightstar evolves as a company and we continue to advance our pipeline of novel programs for the treatment of patients with inherited retinal diseases.”

Mr. Lubner currently serves as executive vice president and chief financial officer of Ra Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ: RARX). Prior to joining Ra Pharma, he served as a member of the senior management team of Tetraphase Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a biotechnology company, from its inception in 2006 through 2015, including roles as senior vice president and chief financial officer. From 1999 to 2005, Mr. Lubner served as chief financial officer of PharMetrics Inc., a pharmacy and medical claims data informatics company acquired by IMS Health in 2005. Prior to joining PharMetrics, he served as vice president and chief financial officer of ProScript from 1996 to 1999. Mr. Lubner is a member of the American Institute of CPAs and is a Certified Public Accountant in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He received his B.S. in business administration from Northeastern University and an M.S. in taxation from Bentley University.

About Nightstar

Nightstar is a leading clinical-stage gene therapy company focused on developing and commercializing novel one-time treatments for patients suffering from rare inherited retinal diseases that would otherwise progress to blindness. Nightstar’s lead product candidate, NSR-REP1, is being developed as a treatment for patients with choroideremia, a rare, inherited cause of progressive blindness that affects approximately one in every 50,000 people. Positive results from a Phase 1/2 trial of NSR-REP1 were published in The Lancet in 2014 and in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2016. Nightstar plans to commence a Phase 3 registrational clinical trial of NSR-REP1 for choroideremia at sites in the United States, Europe and Canada. Nightstar’s second product candidate, NSR-RPGR, is being evaluated in a Phase 1/2 clinical trial to treat patients with X-linked retinitis pigmentosa.

In addition to these two programs, Nightstar is evaluating several other retinal gene therapy product candidates for potential advancement into clinical trials. Nightstar was founded in 2014 by ophthalmology researchers at the University of Oxford. For more information about Nightstar or its clinical trials, please visit www.nightstarx.com.