Turn Therapeutics CEO Bradley Burnam didn’t set out to recruit two U.S. regulatory big wigs for his biotech.
But common scientific interests, professional connections and an interview on the CEO’s podcast, “The Breaking Brad Show,” brought former CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield and former FDA head Dr. Stephen Hahn into the company’s orbit.
“I was familiar with [CEO Bradley Burnam’s] work,” Redfield explained. “He actually did a podcast where he interviewed me for about an hour. We talked about the COVID pandemic, and in that context, I learned a little bit about Turn Therapeutics.”
On top of producing podcasts that explore various public health topics, Burnam is guiding Turn through the advancement of its clinical-stage candidate GX-03, an investigational topical treatment in phase 2 for atopic dermatitis. The company is also developing GX-03 for onychomycosis, a nail fungal disease, and plans to begin a phase 2a study in hidradenitis suppurativa sometime next year.
But it was its delivery platform for the treatment that most intrigued Redfield, who, in addition to his public health experience, spent decades in clinical research with a focus on immunology, microbiology and infectious disease.
“Although [Turn is] using it now largely for atopic dermatitis and some other indications, I think it has broad implications for how to deliver antigens to the human body,” Redfield said, noting that it could hold potential in delivering vaccines or anti-infection treatments.
Called PermaFusion, Turn’s delivery platform is designed to help water-soluble therapeutic agents penetrate the skin, enabling topical delivery of certain molecules that typically need to be injected. Its design removes the need for additives and emulsifiers. Turn says that could minimize off-target exposure, allowing the immune system to function normally during treatment while lowering the rate of adverse events.
“I spent my life in infectious disease and it really has, in my view, some remarkable potential to work not only as an anti-infective agent, but also as an anti-inflammatory,” Redfield said.
Redfield ultimately came aboard Turn in September as chief scientific officer. He joined Hahn, who Redfield had introduced to the company. A former FDA commissioner from 2019 to 2021, Hahn had landed the job of executive clinical and regulatory lead in May to help position and design clinical trials for GX-03 in different indications.
“We worked together when he was commissioner of the FDA and I was at the CDC. We spent many, many hours together on a number of complex issues,” noted Redfield, who was CDC director from 2018-2021.
Hahn’s influence and unique insights as a former FDA leader are already shaping how the company approaches clinical development, Burnam said.
“Dr. Hahn has taught me to work from the label back. It’s been an entire philosophical change for the way I think. From the day that I met him, it was, ‘What do you want your label to be?’” he said.
In practice, that means starting with the goal and planning development around it.
First: inflammatory skin conditions
Burnam is now looking to further expand Turn’s team next year as it moves GX-03 through clinical trials. Unlike many topical treatments, it’s not a steroid, but is designed to reduce the skin’s release of inflammatory cytokines, such as IL-36 and IL-31. Over the summer, the company reported interim results from its phase 2 trial of GX-03 in atopic dermatitis. A subgroup of patients that fall into what Turn describes as an “important treatment gap” with moderate-to-severe lesions on a relatively lower percentage of their body saw a greater reduction in their eczema symptoms than the control group across four efficacy measures.
For example, in that 25-patient interim subgroup, 61.5% of GX-03 treated patients had clear or almost clear skin after four weeks, compared with 8.3% in the control group. The phase 2 trial is ongoing, with results expected in early 2027.
People with severe eczema typically choose between steroids and antibiotic creams, which often don't work well, Redfield said. And the available injected drugs could carry a higher likelihood of side effects and a risk of immunosuppression — tradeoffs that GX-03 could address, Burnam said.
“Safe and fast is my favorite way to position this product,” Burnam said.
Burnam envisions GX-03 could become a treatment that’s broadly effective for many different inflammatory conditions. A phase 3 trial in onychomycosis is planned for 2027.
Next: infectious disease control
While the company is currently focused on skin indications, it has bigger plans for the future, some of which stem from the idea for Turn’s technology that arose during Burnam’s own bout with a health condition.
After grappling with a hospital-acquired infection, Burnam said he started thinking about possible solutions to similar problems.
“I was thinking long-term originally about the infection space, hospital-acquired infections, chronic wounds, other skin diseases associated with microbes, and [antimicrobial resistance] AMR specifically,” Burnam said.
One of his main interest areas was combating methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus colonization. MRSA can be severe and life-threatening, and was once primarily acquired in the hospital, but can lead to community-acquired infections as well. But MRSA doesn’t always cause illness. Some people are colonized with the bug, meaning they carry the organism on their skin or in their noses. While they may not have an infection, they can spread MRSA to others who may get sick from the exposure.
Healthcare professionals can sometimes be colonized with MRSA and transmit it to patients, Redfield noted.
“So this idea that [Burnam] has is: Is there a way we could decolonize hospital employees to decrease the incidence of hospital-acquired staph infections, particularly MRSA?” he said. CDC guidance does not recommend routine MRSA decolonization of healthcare workers, limiting it instead to workers epidemiologically linked to ongoing transmission.
The company plans to begin exploring drug development for MRSA work in 2027, Burnam said. That could be just the beginning as Turn explores the various use-cases for its technology.
In 2025, the company reported early stability data for an intranasal vaccine candidate delivered with PermaFusion. If successful, the approach could make it possible to avoid the need for ultra-cold vaccine storage.
“There are a lot of areas that we're just tapping the surface of, but we also have to show that we can execute, get things through the clinical stages. Once we've shown that we can produce effective products … we can start pursuing other things we have interest in as well,” Burnam said.
