Franz Hefti and Ulrich Feige join Covagen’s Scientific Advisory Board
Zurich, Switzerland, August 20, 2009
Covagen has announced today the appointment of Dr. Franz Hefti and Dr. Ulrich Feige as members of its Scientific Advisory Board.
Dr. Franz Hefti is currently Chief Scientific Officer of Avid Radiopharmaceuticals (Philadelphia, USA), a biotech company developing imaging agents for neurodegenerative diseases. Previously, he was Executive Vice President of Drug Development at Rinat Neuroscience Corporation (San Francisco, USA), a Genentech spin-out company acquired by Pfizer Inc., where he brought antibody therapeutics for Alzheimer’s disease and chronic pain from discovery research to clinical development.
Before joining Rinat, he was Senior Vice President of Neuroscience Research at Merck & Co., where he coordinated the company's neuroscience research worldwide and served as site head for the neuroscience research centers in the United Kingdom and San Diego. During his tenure, small molecule drug candidates covering several diverse drug targets in the neuroscience area were taken into clinical studies. Prior to Merck & Co., Dr. Hefti was Director of the Neuroscience Research Department at Genentech. Before working at Genentech, he spent more than a decade in academia as a Professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and Associate Professor at the University of Miami, where he carried out seminal research on therapeutic applications of neurotrophic factors. He published over 250 papers on neurotrophic factors and topics in neuropharmacology, as well as a textbook “Drug Discovery for Nervous System Diseases”. Dr. Hefti received his PhD from the University of Zurich and did his postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Max Planck Institute in Munich.
Dr. Ulrich Feige is currently President of EUROCBI GmbH, a company offering strategic consulting services in the area of drug development. From 2005 to 2007, Dr. Feige served as Executive Vice President Preclinical Development at ESBATech (Zurich, Switzerland). Prior to ESBATech, he headed the Inflammation Pharmacology Group at Amgen as Director of Pharmacology from 1995 – 2005, and he was involved in the development of TNF-alpha and IL-1 inhibitors. At Amgen, Dr. Feige invented the peptibody technology, which resulted in 2008 in the FDA approval of N-plate (romiplostin, AMG531), a thrombopoiesis stimulating peptibody. Before his engagement at Amgen, he worked in the Inflammation and Bone Department of Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis) in Basel.
“We are very pleased that both Ulrich Feige and Franz Hefti have accepted to join Covagen’s Scientific Advisory Board”, said Julian Bertschinger, Chief Executive Officer of Covagen. “They bring along very valuable experience in preclinical and clinical development of biologics that will be key to obtaining proof of concept in patients for our lead Fynomer. We are very much looking forward to working with them.”
For further details, please contact:
Covagen AG
Dr. Julian Bertschinger, CEO
Tel: +41 (0) 44 635 60 33
julian.bertschinger@covagen.com
About Covagen: Covagen develops next generation protein drugs for the treatment of inflammatory diseases and cancer by using its proprietary protein engineering technology, which has been developed at ETH Zurich (Switzerland). Covagen's innovative platform comprises the recently developed Covalent DNA Display technology and a novel single domain protein scaffold, which - in analogy to antibodies - can be engineered to yield high affinity binding proteins called Fynomers that can be used for therapeutic applications. In addition, the modular structure of Covagen's Fynomers and its favorable biophysical properties potentially allow for treatment modalities that are difficult or impossible to be exploited with antibodies.