Exscientia plc announced the appointment of two technology and clinical development leaders to senior roles to significantly strengthen the impact of differentiating technology applications as well as focused oncology pipeline development.
Appointed to Chief Technology Officer, John P. Overington, Ph.D., will assume strategic leadership over the company’s technology solutions to further accelerate Exscientia’s AI-led drug design platform and fully realise the transformative potential of integrating AI drug design with automated experimentation. As an early adopter of computational data and machine learning to improve drug discovery, John brings over 30 years’ experience of bioinformatics in big pharma, biotech and academia and has authored over 150 publications on the subject.
He joined Exscientia in 2021 as Vice President, Discovery Initiatives, and was appointed Chief Data Officer in 2023. Prior to Exscientia, John held positions at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), BenevolentAI, Pfizer, Inpharmatica and the Medicines Discovery Catapult. At the EBI, he founded CheMBL, one of the most broadly used and largest global drug discovery databases. John has been a Visiting Professor at University College London and the University of Manchester and is a Committee Member for Society of Medicines Research.
Marie-Louise Fjällskog, M.D., Ph.D., will follow Mike Krams, M.D., as the company’s interim Chief Medical Officer and Clinical Development Lead. Holding a Ph.D. in oncology, she brings deep expertise in this therapeutic field from over 30 years as a board-certified oncologist, researcher and drug development leader. She has a strong track record of determining clinical development strategy, trial design, regulatory strategy as well as setting up and overseeing the teams running over 15 clinical trials focused on small molecules, antibodies and bispecifics in oncology and haematology. As an investigator in academia, she acted as principal or co-investigator in more than 30 studies.
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Based in Boston, MA, Marie-Louise has held positions in small biotechs as well as big pharma, including Novartis; most recently, she was Chief Medical Officer at Faron and Lytix. She serves on the boards of several biotech companies, has authored approximately 50 peer-reviewed publications and is an Associate Professor of Oncology at Uppsala University, Sweden.
“I’m thrilled to add these outstanding leaders and their respective expertise to Exscientia’s world-leading team,” said David Hallett, Ph.D., interim Chief Executive Officer and Chief Scientific Officer of Exscientia. “While in his new role John will bring tremendous focus to maximising the benefits of our AI-led drug design integration with 24/7 automated experimentation, Marie-Louise has extensive breadth and depth in oncology drug development to sharpen our clinical development strategy.
“I would like to thank Mike Krams for his invaluable leadership in setting clinical strategy for our initial development stage assets, based on his expertise in model-informed drug development. With our strategic pipeline focus on oncology, we believe it is now time to add specific clinical and regulatory experience in this therapeutic area. We are looking forward to our upcoming trial readouts and to benefitting from John’s and Marie-Louise’s invaluable expertise.”
SOURCE: Businesswire
