Dr Hoekema brings over four decades of successful biotech and life science leadershipDr Cora Griffin appointed to head up business development, follows recent appointment of Simon Jones as CFO/COONew hires to accelerate ambition to turbocharge the discovery platform, develop innovative therapeutic pipeline and expand pharma relationships
SOUTHAMPTON, England, Oct. 2, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Curve Therapeutics (“Curve” or the “Company”), a private biotechnology company pioneering a revolutionary intracellular screening platform addressing complex and challenging disease targets, today announces the further strengthening of its leadership team with the appointments of Andre Hoekema as Chair of the Board and Cora Griffin as Head of Business Development. The appointments continue the strong momentum at Curve following the recent appointment of Simon Jones as CFO/COO.
Dr Hoekema is a highly experienced and successful biotech executive with 40 years’ experience in the industry. He served as Chief Business Officer and member of the Executive Committee at Galapagos Pharma for 18 years, with responsibility spanning M&A, business development and IP. During his time at Galapagos, he led multiple pharma partnerships, acquisitions and divestments, including two landmark deals with Gilead. He was also part of the team that completed successful IPOs on Euronext (2005) and Nasdaq (2015). Andre serves as a member of the supervisory advisory boards of Artax Biopharma, Fibrocor Therapeutics and Mimetas BV.
Curve has also appointed Cora Griffin, an accomplished life sciences business development professional and entrepreneur, as Head of Business Development. Dr Griffin has considerable experience in developing and implementing portfolio strategies from start-ups to large pharmaceutical companies. She was previously Head of Business Development & Alliance Management at ReViral and was instrumental in the acquisition by Pfizer for US$525 million. Cora served as Anti-infectives Strategy Lead at Pfizer, responsible for the Infectious Diseases portfolio strategy for the Research Unit. She is a Jury Member for the EIC Accelerator program for the European Innovation Council and Board Observer at Oppilotech.
Simon Kerry, Chief Executive Officer of Curve Therapeutics, said: “Following the significant Series A financing, we are building a world-class leadership team to turbocharge our proprietary discovery platform and rapidly progress our pipeline. Andre’s wealth of experience in the sector and significant track record, and Cora’s visionary outlook and strategic nous, will be invaluable as we grow the business and progress our lead candidate towards the clinic. We are well placed to accelerate our ambition to build out the pipeline and work with strategic partners to address complex and challenging disease targets and improve patient outcomes.”
Andre Hoekema, PhD, new Chair of Curve Therapeutics, commented: “Curve is an ambitious and innovative biotech with the mission to revolutionize the drug discovery space with its Microcycle discovery platform. Through its pioneering and truly unique approach, Curve is building an innovative therapeutic pipeline and establishing strong relationships with major pharma. I look forward to working with Simon and the leadership team to help the Company progress to the next stage of growth.”
About Curve Therapeutics
Curve Therapeutics is a private biotechnology company pioneering a revolutionary intracellular screening platform to enable the discovery of innovative therapeutics that address complex and challenging disease targets with the potential to transform the lives of patients. Curve originated from world-leading Microcycle research conducted by Professor Tavassoli’s group in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Southampton, UK. Curve is backed by blue chip investors including Advent Life Sciences, Epidarex Capital, Pfizer Ventures, Columbus Venture Partners and British Patient Capital. Curve has a US$1.7bn global research collaboration with MSD the trade name of Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ USA, to discover and validate modulators of up to five therapeutic targets using its Microcycle technology, initially for oncology and neurology indications. For more information visit: www.curvetx.com.
About Curve’s Microcycle platform
Curve has developed an IP-protected, mammalian cell platform technology, for functional screening and enrichment of diverse hexameric cyclic peptide Microcycle libraries, to identify those library members that have the desired biological activity against a therapeutic target. Curve’s platform allows direct screening for biologically active library members inside mammalian cells and facilitates small molecule hit-to-lead programs. A key advantage of the technology is that both the library and the target are present in all their native conformations within a cell. Uniquely, the compact size and rigid structure of Microcycles enables the design of non-peptide small molecule leads. The disease agnostic discovery platform can be used for a wide range of therapeutically relevant targets, including protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions, and has been used by Curve to develop a pipeline of cancer programs against targets including a dual HIF-1/HIF-2 inhibitor and an inhibitor of ATIC homodimerization.
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