GHENT, BELGIUM--(Marketwire - Sep 27, 2012) - Ablynx (EURONEXT BRUSSELS: ABLX) today
announced that Dr Roger Perlmutter and Dr Russell G. Greig will be
proposed as
Independent Non-Executive Directors at the Company's forthcoming
Extraordinary
General Meeting of its shareholders at the beginning of November 2012.
Dr Edwin Moses, Chairman and CEO of Ablynx, said:
"We are delighted that Roger and Russell are prepared to join the Ablynx
Board.
We expect to benefit enormously from their extensive experience in
major
pharmaceutical companies as well as their numerous interactions
with
biotechnology companies at all stages of development. We see these
appointments
as a very important step in the recognition of Ablynx's unique Nanobody
platform
and in the continuing evolution of Ablynx into a significant player
in the
international biopharmaceutical industry."
Dr Roger Perlmutter
Dr Perlmutter was Executive Vice President, Research and Development, at
Amgen
Inc, the world's largest biotechnology company, from 2001 to 2012.
Before
joining Amgen, he was the Executive Vice President of Worldwide Basic
Research
and Preclinical Development at Merck and Co. Prior to joining
Merck, Dr
Perlmutter had been Professor and founding Chairman of the
Department of
Immunology at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA.
Dr Perlmutter is currently a Director of StemCells Inc. and the Immune
Design
Corporation. He is also Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Reed College
and a
Director of the Institute for Systems Biology (a not-for-profit
research
institute based in Seattle, Washington). He is a fellow of the American
Academy
of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the
Advancement
of Science and a past President of the American Association of
Immunologists.
Ablynx is the first potential Board mandate that Dr Perlmutter has
accepted
outside the USA.
Dr Russell Greig
Dr Greig has more than 30 years' experience in the pharmaceutical industry,
with
knowledge and expertise in research and development, business
development and
commercial operations. He spent the majority of his career at
GlaxoSmithKline,
where he held a number of positions including GSK's President of
Pharmaceuticals
International from 2003 to 2008 and Senior Vice President Worldwide
Business
Development. From 2008 to 2010, Dr Greig was also President of SR One,
GSK's
Corporate Venture Group. He is currently Chairman of Syntaxin (UK), AM
Pharma
(The Netherlands) and Isconova (Sweden) as well as a Director of
Tigenix
(Belgium). He also acts as a consultant to Genocea (US), BigDNA
(Scotland),
Edinburgh BioQuarter (Scotland), and Kurma Life Sciences (France). He
served as
acting CEO at Genocea and Isconova for an interim period. He is also a
member of
the Scottish Scientific Advisory Committee.
About Ablynx
Ablynx is a biopharmaceutical company engaged in the discovery and
development
of Nanobodies(®), a novel class of therapeutic proteins based on
single-domain
antibody fragments, for a range of serious human diseases,
including
inflammation, haematology, oncology and pulmonary disease. Today, the
Company
has approximately 25 programmes in the pipeline and seven Nanobodies at
clinical
development stage. Ablynx has ongoing research collaborations and
significant
partnerships with major pharmaceutical companies including Boehringer
Ingelheim,
Merck KGaA and Novartis. The Company is headquartered in Ghent, Belgium.
More
information can be found on www.ablynx.com.
press release in pdf:
http://hugin.info/137912/R/1643851/529505.pdf
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Source: Ablynx via Thomson Reuters ONE
[HUG#1643851]