Phaim Phaim

Management Team

Chief Operating Officer, Company Secretary, Co-Founder

Dr. Nara Daubeney

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Dr Nara Daubeney is the CEO of Phaim Pharma. She is a consultant surgeon with decades worth of experience in multiple healthcare systems and has been on the executive team of Phaim from conception. Her journey started as the company COO and has moved to CEO in the last year, cementing the growth of the company in leading on first and best in class treatments in autoimmunity. As an experienced clinical surgical immunologist, her undergraduate medical studies were at Imperial College where she went on to do a Masters in Surgical Education as well as a PhD in immunology. She is Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England (having studied for her Membership at the same institution prior to that), obtained her Diploma in Otolaryngology, and is a passionate experienced leader in bringing novel drugs to market, as well as affecting positive organisation change in complex healthcare systems. She is clinical Lead for Innovation at the Royal Society of Medicine.

She volunteers as part of the BioIndustry Association mentoring scheme, is a public governor of Chelsea & Westminster Hospital Foundation Trust, and is an executive board member of ENTUK. As part of a dedicated team, she has helped steer Phaim Pharma from a UK start-up to a growth company embarking on clinical trials in type 1 diabetes and with discovery pipeline in multiple other autoimmune diseases.

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Chief Executive Officer, Co-Founder

Professor Piers Daubeney

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Professor Piers Daubeney MA DM FRCP FRCPCH DCH trained in medicine at Oxford University and St Thomas' Hospital gaining Honours in Therapeutics and Clinical Pharmacology. He specialised as a paediatric cardiologist working at the Royal Brompton Hospital and is Professor of Practice (paediatric cardiology) at Imperial College. He has written more than 50 scientific papers and edited 2 books. He jointly founded and is also CEO of The Congenital and Children's Heart Centre (www.childrensheartcentre.com) providing private medical and surgical care to children and adults with congenital heart disease with large national and international referral base.

His expertise lies in the development of new drugs that promote child health and he has extensive experience of large multicentre drug studies. He is a member of the UK Medicines for Children Clinical Research Network and previously the British Paediatric Surveillance Unit at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.

Dr Piers Daubeney is the Chief Executive Officer of the Company and is responsible for the day to day running of the Company as well as future business development and strategy.

President, Chief Scientific Officer, Co-Founder

Dr. Tihamer Orban

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Dr Tihamer Orban MD MRCPCH is a world-leader in the field of the immunological mechanisms underlying T1DM. His medical degree and board certification in Paediatrics were from the medical school of Szent-Gyorgyi Albert University, Hungary. He worked at the Joslin Diabetes Center, Harvard from 1993 to 2011. His career as a Translational Clinical Investigator has been devoted to the research, discovery and clinical evaluation of novel therapies for T1DM. He was previously Principal Investigator at three major US nationwide networks dedicated to ameliorate autoimmunity including T1DM (TrialNet, Immune Tolerance Network and Autoimmune Centre of Excellence at Harvard, all funded by National Health Institute of USA). He was the Chairman of the Safety Monitoring Committee of the TrialNet for many years overseeing safety of several multicentre clinical trials. Whilst at the Joslin Diabetes Center, Boston, USA, he ran several clinical trials, and was instrumental in designing and executing them. He initiated and chaired a phase 2 multicentre clinical trial using abatacept in T1DM patients. The results were published in The Lancet, with a joint commentary titled "New hope for immune therapy in Type 1 diabetes".

Dr Tihamer Orban is the President and Chief Scientific Officer of the Company. He is responsible for overseeing and guiding the management and governance of the Company. He provides visionary and strategic leadership to ensure that the company is progressing in accordance with its missions. As Chief Scientific Officer, he also has special responsibility for managing the scientific development of the AIM therapy and leading on future research and development.

Founding Member

Co-Founder and previous CMO

Dr. Heyam Jalahej

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Dr Heyam Jalahej MD is a Board Certified Paediatrician and Surgeon, and completed her medical training at Szent-Gyorgyi Albert University, Hungary. She brings significant expertise in Ethics and Clinical Compliance, and trial design. From 2001 to 2011 she worked with the Type 1 diabetes research team at the Joslin Diabetes Center, Harvard, where she successfully brought to completion several multiple complex phase 1 and phase 2 clinical trials in the field of diabetes. Her expertise in pre-clinical and translational clinical research programmes and their coordination played a key role in developing a novel AIM therapy for T1DM. She shepherded the approval process from concept through FDA investigational drug approval to the successful completion of the Phase 1 clinical trial.

Dr. Jalahej retired in July 2023 and we are enormously grateful for her wisdom and guidance from our journey's start.