What is it Like to Go From Treating Patients Directly to Running a Company?

Dr. Jay Lalezari, CEO and CMO, CytoDyn, describes the transition from decades as a front-line HIV clinician to running a company as “very strange,” noting he’s still handling double duty as both CEO and CMO until the company grows large enough to separate those roles.

Dr. Lalezari expresses that he came to CytoDyn out of a long-standing belief in Leronlimab, a drug worked on since the early 2000s as a strong antiviral candidate for HIV, later extending to Covid-19 and now oncology. He still runs CytoDyn’s research program and continues seeing cancer patients directly, which he says serves as a constant, grounding reminder of the urgency behind bringing Leronlimab forward, particularly for solid tumor oncology, keeping him focused on the patients ultimately at stake.

Asked how a single treatment could move across such different disease areas, from HIV to Covid-19 to CCR5-positive MSS metastatic colorectal cancer, Lalezari says there was no deliberate plan behind it.

Instead, he explains that CCR5 itself keeps showing up throughout medicine: it’s the receptor HIV uses to enter cells, the signal that draws inflammatory cells into the lungs during Covid-19, and a key receptor solid tumors exploit to build a protective microenvironment, allowing them to grow blood vessels and evade the host immune system.

Rather than Leronlimab chasing new indications, Lalezari frames it as simply keeping pace with wherever CCR5 activity appears, a receptor he notes is implicated well beyond these three areas, including a range of inflammatory disorders and even the plague bacillus. In his words, the company is “chasing the CCR-5 data in science.”