Jedrzej Litwiniuk

A once-daily pill that picks up where Roche walked away

Nicorandil works. Cardiologists outside the US have leaned on it for years to ease the chest pain of chronic stable angina. It was developed by Chugai Pharmaceutical, acquired by Roche, and then its cardiovascular program was quietly discontinued. The molecule didn't fail. It just got orphaned.

Jedrzej Litwiniuk - Jed to most people - looked at that abandoned program and saw something other people missed: not a dead end, but a starting line. His company, Auxilius Pharma, took the old twice-daily drug and rebuilt it into AUX-001, an extended-release formulation designed to be taken once a day, with a half-life that runs past nine hours. The science isn't a leap into the unknown. It's a sharper question asked about something already known.

That is the whole thesis. Auxilius calls them "value-added medicines" - drugs with established clinical histories, reformulated to do more for patients while carrying a fraction of the development risk of a brand-new molecule. The company's tagline says it plainly: Your Heart, Our Mission.

Figures from company disclosures and trade press, Dec 2025. Total funding to date is roughly $7.8M across seed and Series A.

From the deal table to the lab bench

Most biotech founders come up through chemistry or the clinic. Litwiniuk came up through money. He interned at JPMorgan Chase. He ran investment as a Director at PZU, one of Poland's largest insurers. He managed mergers, acquisitions and development at LUX MED, a major healthcare group. Then he served as Advisory Board Member and Chief Financial Officer at Picket Pharmaceuticals.

In 2019 two things happened. He earned an Executive Master of Health Administration from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, and he co-founded Auxilius Pharma with Uwe Tigör, MD, the company's Chief Medical Officer. The pairing is the point: a physician who knows what the heart needs, and an operator who knows how capital and regulation actually move.

A career built on spotting mispriced value

There's a thread running through the resume. Investment desks, M&A, corporate finance - all jobs about finding value that the market has not yet recognized. AUX-001 is the same instinct applied to medicine. A drug the industry had written off becomes, with the right reformulation and the right regulatory path, a potential first-line therapy. The skill didn't change. The asset class did.

Why one pill instead of two changes the math

It sounds small. Take a drug people swallow twice a day and make it once a day. But adherence is where many good medicines quietly fail - people forget the second dose, and the benefit erodes. Litwiniuk's argument is that convenience is not a luxury feature here. It is the mechanism.

AUX-001 is positioned to do two things at once: control angina symptoms and reduce hospitalizations. That second part matters to the people who pay the bills. Auxilius says payors have signaled willingness to reimburse precisely because fewer hospital visits is a number an insurer understands. And because the FDA accepted a 505(b)(2) regulatory pathway, the program can lean on existing safety data and skip Phase II - going from a Phase Ib bioequivalence study straight toward a Phase III efficacy trial.

The development risk, visualized