Régent Laporte

Dr. Laporte is a Pharmacologist with over 25 years of pharmaceutical industry experience in translational pharmacology and early-stage drug discovery and development. He earned a DVM and an MSc in Veterinary Anatomy and Physiology from the University of Montreal, a PhD in Pharmacology from the College of Medicine of the University of Vermont, and completed postdoctoral training in Cardiology and in Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School. His graduate and postdoctoral work, conducted in the laboratories of Professors Ismail Laher (then at the University of Vermont) and Kathleen G. Morgan (then at Harvard Medical School), focused on the regulation of vascular smooth muscle tone by the sarcoplasmic reticulum and by protein kinase C, and led to co-authored reviews in Physiological Reviews and Pharmacological Reviews.

From 2000 to 2015, Dr. Laporte held positions of increasing leadership at the Ferring Research Institute of Ferring Pharmaceuticals in San Diego, culminating as Director of Exploratory Pharmacology. He spearheaded the drug discovery team that designed selepressin (FE 202158), a first-in-class selective vasopressin V1A receptor agonist drug candidate that advanced to Phase 2b/3 clinical trials for vasodilatory hypotension in septic shock, and led the academic collaborations with Professors Donald W. Landry (Columbia University), James A. Russell (University of British Columbia), Jean-Louis Vincent (Université libre de Bruxelles), and the late Daniel L. Traber (University of Texas Medical Branch) that generated the preclinical proof of concept for selepressin in animal models of sepsis and septic shock. Across his career, he has led or contributed to over eight peptide drug discovery programs and participated in the selection of five peptide New Chemical Entities as drug candidates, including the first-in-class kappa opioid receptor agonist KORSUVA (difelikefalin), approved by the FDA in 2021.

In 2015, Dr. Laporte founded Laporte & Associates LLC, a biotechnology and pharmaceutical R&D consulting firm in San Diego, where he serves as Principal Consultant advising biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and academic clients on preclinical proof of mechanism, principle, and concept strategies, drug lead optimization, regulatory documents, grant proposals, and due diligence. From 2015 to 2025, he served as Course Director of the Translational Research courses in the Master of Advanced Studies in Clinical Research Program at the School of Medicine of the University of California, San Diego, and from 2019 to 2023 directed the Translational Science Certificate Program at the Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute. He has been a Scientific Advisor to Resuscitation Therapeutics, Inc. since 2019. His current scientific interests include selective peripheral α2-adrenergic receptor agonist vasopressor pharmacology and sodium-hydrogen exchanger isoform 1 inhibition by cariporide for the treatment of cardiac arrest. His scientific work appears in journals including Physiological Reviews, Pharmacological Reviews, Critical Care Medicine, the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, and the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, has been cited more than 2,200 times (Google Scholar), and is the subject of four US patents on which he is a co-inventor.